


The Best for You

by HeadintheCloudsForever



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Swearing, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 58,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24588784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeadintheCloudsForever/pseuds/HeadintheCloudsForever
Summary: Ellie is a lone wanderer after Joel mysteriously disappears shortly after their escape from David's people while on a supply run, still recovering from his wounds. Believing Joel to be lost or left for dead, Ellie is left to fend for herself when she runs into an unsavory group and has to use her wits about to her in the hopes of holding out long enough for Joel to come. Rated T.
Relationships: Ellie & Joel (The Last of Us), Joel & Sarah (The Last of Us)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 54





	1. An Unexpected Encounter

**CHAPTER ONE**

A vast blanket of white hung heavy over the hills. It suffocated every building and every tree at their base, swallowing every distant object and vanishing around every corner. It crept round an old abandoned church, its silent footsteps tiptoeing around each gravestone in the churchyard, passing by Ellie, and many of the living dead, before finally coming to rest at the foot of the sidewalk that Ellie happened to be standing on, looking at where she wanted to go.

The young fourteen-year-old stood in the still silence of the otherwise deserted alleyway, the girl's only comfort being that of the cold white blanket that hugged her shoulders and grabbed at her legs, and the fog was kind of making her jeans damp, causing the denim to cling to her legs, a sensation she didn't really like but had to ignore for now. She had more important things to deal with. Like getting fucking food and finding a place to camp out for the night.

Everyone ignored the signs of the apocalypse when it first started, though the disease and famine stalked all the corners of the world and the death toll was in the billions. Before everyone went under, the people were calling it the end of days in the few media outlets that still ran before the world went to shit. The big cities, places like Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, Tampa, you name it, became nothing but derelict shells and the surviving refugees took to the countryside for shelter, where most of them were shot on sight for fear that they brought the disease with them.

People didn't have burials for their dead anymore, the living would no longer approach a corpse for fear it would come back and try to eat you, and fear of the Cordyceps Brain Infection was a real thing. Ellie hadn't even been born yet when the fungus started spreading and infecting people, but now that she was fourteen, she knew enough about the world to know that the world was well and truly fucked.

The fungus grew while the host was still alive, with the hosts undergoing four stages of infection, each stage deadlier than the last. Ellie furrowed her brows into a frown and poked her head around the corner as she neared the corner pharmacy she'd been trying to get into for the last few days to see what she could salvage so she could get the fuck out of this God's asshole of a city and try to find someplace civilized, if any place like that even still existed, or if it was all just bullshit Joel had been telling her so that she would sleep better at nighttime.

She'd managed to escape from a group she'd been traveling with for the better part of two weeks, giving them the slip in the dead of night. Ellie knew it had been a bad idea to go with them from the start, not fully trusting them, but she only did it mostly so she wouldn't have to be alone in this world that had gone to fucking shit and showed no signs of getting better. Joel had mysteriously disappeared while out on a scouting mission for food and supplies, shortly after the pair of them had managed to evade that fucking group of cannibals, and Ellie could only assume the worst, given that he'd gone off in search of food and supplies while still healing from pretty much being impaled, despite Ellie telling him not to go, but the stubborn old ass didn't listen to her and had gone out anyways, telling her to stay put.

That had been two weeks ago, and now she could only assume the worst of the man that had kind of become her friend to her. That he was dead, or he'd left her alone and made good on his promise following their fight about his dead daughter, Sarah. Ellie pursed her lips into a thin line and couldn't help but to stick out her bottom lip in a slight pout as she peeked over the back of the black truck making its way down the road and away from her.

She'd almost had the bastards dead to right, and then the two assholes in the truck had pretty much laughed their asses off when they saw a fourteen-year-old kid, a girl, no less, was attempting to carjack them. One of 'em had even gone so far as to make a joke about her being old enough to drive, which Ellie had responded to in kind by flipping them off and trying to shoot a hole in one of the car's tires.

Fuck, she missed Joel. Like really badly. More than she'd honestly care to admit to him, because she knew that if Joel ever learned the truth, his fucking pride and ego would be unbelievable to live with. It felt like ever since he disappeared, she couldn't do any fucking thing right, though Ellie knew that wasn't totally true. She could shoot. Enough to defend herself, but sometimes, like just now, she still fucked up when under a lot of pressure. She pursed her lips into a thin, rigid line as her hand shook, fumbling the weapon as she almost dropped the goddamned thing trying to put it back in its holster, and would have blown a hole in her sneaker if the safety hadn't been on.

"Fuck!" she swore, hating hearing the crack and dip in her voice, though Ellie recognized she was just fucking scared, and she wished she weren't. Thank God for safeties. Ellie shook her head to clear it, took a second to readjust her ponytail, making the elastic band tighter, and adjusted her backpack straps to distribute the weight more evenly across her back and ease the ache in her shoulder. She knitted her brows together in confusion, thinking the next time she raided one of the downtown department stores for supplies, she'd get one of those canvas bags or something that she'd seen some guys carry back before the world went to shit.

Just so her back didn't ache all the time from this stupid pack and would serve her a hell of a lot better on these smaller supply runs than this overstuffed worn out old backpack of hers she'd had for forever. Ellie inhaled a sharp breath of air and stepped out from behind the corner of the building, carefully inching her way towards the looted pharmacy, thinking how it was kind of creepy that the fucking street ahead of her looked like a goddamned skeleton.

And just that thought alone in it of itself was enough to send a cold chill down Ellie's spine. Stripped of flesh a long time ago by all the locusts and other bugs that freaked her out, swarming in what felt like droves. She angrily swatted away a mosquito, reaching up a hand and brushed her bangs out of her eyes and trudged forward, careful to make sure her footfalls were quiet. Ellie crept forward as quietly as she could, hopping over the busted in window of the front of the pharmacy and made her way towards the back.

She'd come back to this spot in particular to get the two gallon jugs of water and to raid the cookie and chips aisle, her plan to stuff her backpack with as much junk food as she possibly could. The only benefit to not having Joel around for the current time being was that he couldn't piss and moan about her eating food that wasn't necessarily good for her these days.

He wasn't here to tell her what to do, and she certainly wasn't going to let thoughts of that pain in the ass tell her what to eat when he wasn't even physically here right next to her to make some smart-ass comment about the ingredients in the packet of Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies she'd just picked up. She scoffed and rolled her eyes, moving on and grabbing a pack of the Double Stuf Oreos, her personal favorite. What she wouldn't give for honest-to-god cold milk, though! Dunk some of those into the glass of milk and Ellie knew you couldn't ask for a better snack food.

She scowled, pursing her lips into a thin line as Joel's chastising voice rang in her eardrums, refusing to part from her thoughts. _You're not seriously gonna eat that crap, are you? That shit ain't good for you, Ellie, baby girl._

Ellie's frown deepened, and she irritably waved away Joel's phantom voice in her mind with a brush of her hand. "Who gives a shit?" she grumbled, more to herself as she slid her backpack off her shoulder and slipped a couple packages of cookies and chips into her backpack, careful to set the water bottles and soda on the bottom, the chips and cookies on top since those could easily get squished if she put the heavy stuff on top of the fragile stuff.

With a slight groan, Ellie shifted her backpack back onto her shoulders and snaked her way through the pharmacy's aisles, trying to gather as much supplies as she possibly could. She didn't exactly know where she was going next, and she didn't even know where the fuck she would start looking in the hopes of finding Joel, but…

"I gotta try," Ellie whispered more to herself, and it was this flicker of hope, this newfound resolve that kept her going, and she clenched her jaw shut in the effort to quit the bad habit of grinding her teeth as she wandered down the aisle, plucking a couple of discarded toothbrushes still in their packaging and a tube of toothpaste, stuffing it into one of the smaller compartments of her backpack, trying to take only the shit that was necessary and wouldn't weigh her down in case she needed to make a run for it if she ran into anything like Bloaters or Clickers.

Ellie huffed in frustration and wiped a bead of sweat off her brow from nervousness. She could hear a couple of them, the ones that sounded like the Clickers, close by in the not-so-distant street corner less than a block from here, so she'd have to move like a bat out of hell if she wanted to get out of here. But where the hell would she go?

It's not exactly like Joel had _told_ her where he was going when he just up and left her on that supply run. Ellie sighed as she came to the realization that she might as well give up completely on any hope of finding Joel. She had been cursing herself internally for her fucking stupidity for the last two weeks, ever since he'd just up and vanished.

She should have known better. She should have asked Joel where he was going, and fucking followed him and made him take her with him. They needed each other, they had to stick together or else…

 _You're not gonna make it_ , the dark voices in her head taunted her. They were doing that more and more in frequency these days. _Face it, kiddo. You fucking need Joel by your side or you won't last another week out here_.

For all she knew, he was already dead or turned into one of the infected already, so why the hell she still hung around this shithole place, Ellie didn't know. Was it because she missed Joel and his pain in the ass sarcasm?

Was that it? Was that the reason she had woken up at the ass crack of dawn before most kids her age were typically up to wander aimlessly through the streets, making her way down to one of the shops that hadn't been totally picked over, so that she could gather up enough supplies on the off chance that he did happen to just saunter back into her life, they' be ready to leave at a split second's notice?

What she wanted most more than anything else, Ellie guessed, was enough food and supplies to last her until she could find another group, a _safe_ one this time, who would take her in and not ask her any questions, though her conscience pricked her guilty at the back of her mind as she thought of the Fireflies. Marlena was probably anxiously waiting for Joel to deliver her to them safely, and…

"Here I am," she thought bitterly, feeling her jaw lock up in a moment of bitterness that she couldn't quell. "If I could just find a car, I could make my way to Salt Lake City and hopefully, make the world a better place…"

If she believed Marlene, the entire fate of humanity rested within Ellie's decision to come to Utah. She was maybe the only human that had been resistant to getting infected, and she'd been bitten now for a while now, the scar on her arm now a jagged white and pink, but still gross and horrible looking mess, if she was being honest with herself.

Though there was a really big part of Ellie that didn't _want_ to find a car, and even if she could, she didn't know how to drive very well. Joel had promised to teach her, but he hadn't quite gotten around to that part yet.

She bit her bottom lip, hard enough to bleed as she stuffed a few packets of instant noodles and canned vegetables into her backpack and made her way towards the back of the store, where the bottles of pills and medicines were kept.

When Ellie was confident that her backpack was stuffed to the brim and bursting with as much stuff as she could possibly carry and not fucking murder her poor vertebrae, she carefully inched her way towards the store's glass door, which now was just a door frame, though for some fucking reason, the goddamned bell above the door frame still dinged any time you dared to step across the threshold and onto the stained floor mat.

Ellie glanced down and crinkled her nose in disgust, thinking the shit that had stained the little mat looked suspiciously like dried old blood. She wondered what the fuck had happened in here to cause such a goddamn mess. "Looters, probably," she sighed, clutching onto the straps of her backpack with both hands, and carefully poked her head around the corner of the street, looking for any sign of that Clicker she had thought she'd heard.

She felt her hand drift downwards and tighten on the hilt of her shiv. These slippery motherfucking bastards were tough sons of bitches to kill, usually requiring a kill shot right to the head before they'd finally go down for good. Though there was only one of them, and Ellie felt her shoulders slump in relief as she exhaled a shaking breath. She looked to the left. To the right. No other infected that she could see. If it were just the one, she could probably still sneak out of here and head towards the woods and hopefully find a good place to set up a campsite.

Ellie stepped outside, gripping the hilt of her knife in one hand, and a baseball bat she'd randomly found discarded on the side of the road the other day tightly in her hand as she walked slowly down the center of the road.

Always, she was constantly letting her gaze dart to the left and right. If there was one thing being on her own this long had taught her, it was that she hadn't fucking survived on sheer luck alone. Joel, at the very least, besides helping teach her how to shoot, had taught her to maintain a constant awareness of her surroundings.

Ellie nervously swallowed past the lump forming in her throat as she could swear she could feel her heart pounding in her chest as it threatened to escape. Ellie let out a startled cry of surprise as a single echoing crack rent the otherwise silent air, and the single Clicker which had been aimlessly wandering the street by itself had been shot.

 _Joel?_ She bit down even harder on her bottom lip to prevent a muffled noise of hope and adrenaline from escaping her lips and giving away her position as she crouched behind an old tin trash can to avoid being spotted. _But…if someone shot the Clicker, then where's the shooter…?_ Ellie furrowed her brows into a frown as she glanced up at the rooftops, looking any signs of a sniper or a gunman and not seeing anybody.

"Just fucking great," she growled. So now, she was exposed and out in the open, a fourteen-year-old kid, and a girl, to top that off, with a backpack full of supplies anybody could just up and take from her if they were stronger and faster than her if they fucking wanted to, and she had no idea where this supposed mystery shooter might be, and if they ran into Ellie, would they be a friend or foe? Ellie clenched her teeth in anger and fear. She had no fucking clue how to handle this situation. Any time a firefight started, Joel was always front and center and ordering Ellie to stay back, insisting to her that he had this. She winced as another shot pierced the air, and the horrible screeching wailing of what sounded like a Runner, though thankfully not anywhere close to Ellie's position where she sat crouched behind the trash can, came from her left, somewhere off in the distance, and were quickly silenced by another gunshot fired.

The unmistakable thud of the infected's body hitting the street reached Ellie's ears, and shakily, she rose to her feet. Inhaling a shaky breath, Ellie gripped onto the handle of her baseball bat with both hands and took a few steps out from behind the trash can, violently jerking her right leg back as a single shell landed within inches of her sneaker, the sound of which was followed by a man's voice, coming from somewhere high above Ellie's head.

"Got 'er," the stranger yelled, followed by a fourth shot. "I fuckin' _told_ you there was someone else out here, Sam." Ellie frowned and glanced up towards the source of the voice. The girl saw a single flash of movement, a flash of dark forest green, and she let out a muffled squeak of surprise as yet a third shot was fired, this shell whizzing right past her ear, and would have grazed her left lobe had she not bolted out of the way and dove behind a lamp post.

"Fucking stop shooting!" she screamed, flinching as she heard the heavy footfalls of what sounded to the teenager like a couple of guys coming out from their various hiding positions to flank Ellie's cornered position. "I—I'm not an infected, I'm just a fucking _kid_! You assholes would really shoot a girl? Fucking quit it, goddamn it! Buncha cocksuckers!" Ellie shouted, glad Joel wasn't around to scold her for bad language, not that she would have cared one way or another, and decided she couldn't hide, choosing to gingerly step out from behind the streetlamp, her hands raised in front of her face in self-defense.

She let out a tiny whimper of fear and could swear she heard Joel. _Talk to 'em, baby girl. If you can't fight your way out, try talkin' things through. Any man decent enough will listen_. "Fuck me and fuck this goddamned shit, Joel," she whisper-hissed it through gritted teeth, her eyes darting wildly to the left and right, looking for an escape. None. "It's worth a try," she moaned, lowering her voice so the guys, four, by the looks of them, couldn't hear her. "Joel, if I die because of them, I'm gonna come back to _haunt_ you." Inhaling another shaking breath, thinking it was kind of amazing she could get any oxygen to her lungs at all, she turned towards the group of guys now surrounding her, all of them a lot older than her, early thirties, one guy in his early twenties, she guessed, and the leader of the pack, a tall, stocky, imposing guy in his early fifties that looked like he'd been a body builder or maybe a pro wrestler in a past life, sneered at Ellie, his lips curling upwards.

"Well, well, well, baby girl," he crooned, and Ellie visibly flinched, though she knew this punk couldn't have known that was Joel's nickname for her. "Why the hell you runnin' these streets all by yourself? You got a group?" he asked, his green eyes narrowing to mere slits as he glanced to the left and right of where Ellie stood, as though he thought maybe somebody would come out and flank their group, thinking Ellie just a distraction.

Ellie's throat suddenly felt dry as she licked her lips and bit the inside of her cheeks, and then her tongue as a dozen or so cuss words flitted through her mind, all of them begging to be released from the tip of her tongue, but she fought back the urge and swallowed hard past the lump forming in her throat. If she lied, they'd probably see right through her bluff. They'd challenge the rest of her 'group' to come out, and when they didn't, they'd know she'd been trying to pull a fast one on them, and would probably not hesitate to shoot her on sight where she stood, steal all her stuff, and not so much as bat an eyelid at shooting a fourteen-year-old girl in cold blood. They were…

 _Evil_. _Remember what happened the last fucking time you trusted a new group. They turned out to be a bunch of sick, perverted cannibals_. her conscience warned, and she blinked owlishly at one of the old man's crew as she realized the youngest one, the guy in his twenties, a blond-haired kid, had asked Ellie a question. She flinched and turned. "H—huh?" she stammered, hating hearing the crack in her voice and how fucking _weak_ she sounded.

The guy huffed in agitation; his beefy arms folded across his chest. The kid had a face that was strong and chiseled, though it kind of looked like to Ellie like the guy's face had been pistol whipped a time or two, maybe in a bar brawl. "I _said_ ," he emphasized, sounding as though he hated having to repeat himself for a second time, and he struck Ellie as the type of guy not very patient, though it escaped his lips as more of a growl uttered, spat more than spoken, "if you got a group. Family. You got someone lookin' out for you? How the fuck did you make it out here all on your own, kid? Ain't no way you lasted this fuckin' long without a whole lotta help and a little bit of luck."

His dark brown eyes drifted towards her backpack, and Ellie recognized that smile. He was going to take it.

" _Hey_!" she shouted, lunging for her pack as she felt it violently being wrenched off her shoulders by the youngest guy, who introduced himself in an off-handed comment as Levi. "Fucking give that back, piece of shit!"

The blond-haired kid in his twenties called Levi rolled his eyes and smirked as he unzipped the main compartment of her backpack and rummaged through it. "Shut the fuck up, kid. You make any more noise and you'll attract a whole lot more than just the couple Runners and Clickers we killed. We ain't got enough firepower left if we run into a Bloater or something," he snapped, and wordlessly tossed the backpack towards his comrades.

"Look man, I—if you want my backpack and the shit I got in there, just fucking take it and leave me alone," Ellie begged, biting her bottom lip. She blinked back briny tears that were welling in the corners of her eyes, threatening to spill over if she couldn't get a fucking handle on her emotions, and fast. "I wanna get outta here before night comes on, so just take whatever the fuck you want out of my backpack, give it back, and I'll go."

Levi furrowed his blond brows into a frown and looked towards the leader of the gang for confirmation.

"I don't think so, kid," growled the leader. "It's been a long time since we found a stray like you wanderin' the streets. An' you're just a fucking kid, little girl." He turned towards the other three guys and then looked back to Ellie, who swallowed hard past the lump forming in her throat. He was looking really pissed off. "Ain't no way you _ain't_ lyin' to us, little girl. Your fuckin' story just has to be a buncha goddamned bullshit. It's probably what kept you around this long, hasn't it? Hell. For all I fuckin' know, you're a setup and this is a trap me an' my boys here just waltzed right into. This could be a plant by one of those fuckin' military groups. You with FEDRA, you little bitch?"

He stepped forward, closing off the gap of space between the two of them, the tip of his crooked nose almost touching the tip of Ellie's. She shirked back and pressed her back as far against the brick wall of the run-down deli they'd cornered her by, though she knew it was pointless. There was nowhere for her to fucking run.

"No." Ellie growled it through clenched teeth, recognizing her rage was manifesting from a place of fear. She let out a muffled whimper and closed her eyes, turning her head sharply to the left as she breathed slowly, willing the tension in her shoulders to leave her and her body to remain fucking calm. It was her only shot at this.

The leader frowned. "What's your name, kid?" he asked, clamping down on a toothpick he held between his teeth and chewing on the end. "Name's Jack. The blond kid close to your age is Sam, an' the others are Terry an' Jake."

"E—Ellie," she whispered, her voice barely above a whisper. Even from up close like this, she could see the group leader's cruel, detestable, disturbing smile in a sinister kind of smile. She bit the inside of her cheek. She'd seen that same fucking look in David's eyes, right before he'd tried and almost succeeded in strangling her to death.

Ellie wondered, albeit however inappropriately, if people like this still felt things, if there was even a shred of the old them left, if they could look back on their past selves, before the world went to shit and life as everyone knew it was fucked, if they could look at themselves now, in the future, would the past them like what they saw?

Ellie felt her lips part open slightly to speak and had no time to react or make a run for it as he balled his strong hand into a fist and brought it down on the right side of her face. Ellie's eyesight blurred, but not because tears were welling up. Everything became fuzzy, and the men's voices all distorted and sounding muffled, like they were underwater or something, and then she saw nothing at all and heard nothing at all except for a strange ringing in her eardrums, like tinnitus, the thing that Joel was always bitching about, saying he was going deaf cause of it.

Her consciousness was floating through an empty space filled with a thick, horrible static. Throughout the inky space of blackness as her mind dove for the blackness, her heartbeats pounded loudly, echoing in her ears, alongside fading pleas, and whimpers for help. Ellie could have sworn she called out Joel's name a couple of times.

The feeling in her body drained away until all was black.


	2. Their Choice

  


**CHAPTER TWO**

Joel. The girl while even in her semi-state of unconscious had mumbled that guy's name in her sleep more than a couple of times, had to be at least five or six if you were keeping track of that sort of thing, and not even thirty minutes into their hour long car ride back to their base camp, and Sam and the other passengers in the truck had the guy's name fully committed to memory, and Sam was starting to wonder if the guy was going to be a problem for them in the long run.

For a second, he contemplated digging through the back seat of the vehicle in one of their backpacks to see if he could find some duct tape or something to duct tape her mouth shut and prevent the kid from saying anything else and leave the guys in peace and quiet. Sam hadn't really expected to find anyone else out alone wandering the streets at that late hour of the evening as night was beginning to fall, the sun going behind the horizon, and he'd been way more than shocked to find out it was a twelve or thirteen year old girl, nonetheless.

Back there, near the pharmacy and the convenience store, what he had assumed to be nothing but a shadow lurking behind one of the abandoned cars left to gather dust on the side of the road had taken the form of a kid. Sam frowned as he remembered spotting her ducking behind a trash can in the hopes of avoiding being spotted, but it had been too fucking late for that.

Under Sam's brief gaze from his perch on one of the store alcove rooftop's across the way, the kid hadn't withdrawn or flinch, though he had wondered if she had really seen him at all back there, but neither had the girl called Ellie taken a step forward to be seen, and it was only when Jake had fired those two warning shots, one at her feet, and another that would have blown a hole in her earlobe if she hadn't moved, that she'd noticed Jack and his crew.

The kid's shape already had the beginnings of growing into a woman, yet Sam doubted the girl was halfway through her teens. She had to be only like thirteen or fourteen. Fifteen at the oldest. She had stared with that weird look the girls growing up in this day and age of the fucking apocalypse took, one designed not to give any emotion away. The girl was still pretty much a kid, Sam could tell, hiding the delicate sensitive side of her personality behind that goddamned streetlamp she'd tried to take refuge under back there. It was just another sign of violence in this day and age.

The tension that controlled the kid's face when she'd been screaming at Jack and the others to stop fucking shooting at her and to plead with them to give her back her backpack, Sam knew, had always been a part of her life. For her to only be fourteen or so years old, meant the kid had grown up in this environment when the Cordyceps Infection had already spread, so this kind of life was all she knew, and to take that away from her, and she was apt to re-invent it simply to keep her status quo in the world.

Like pressure in a soda bottle that had been shaken before you thought to pop the top off, Sam and his crew quickly made the natural assumption that it was something that was gonna have to be taken down slowly to keep the kid functioning the right way, if she was going to be of any help to them and a valuable asset to their team. The kid wasn't in any fucking danger with them. She was just gonna have to learn how to trust them, that's all.

While Sam hadn't really approved of Jack bringing his whole fucking _fist_ down on the back of the girl's skull, at least it kept her quiet. The last thing they needed was the girl waking up and trying to start a whole bunch of shit, though all she could really do at this point to them was try to bite and kick them, given the second Jack's fist had come down on the girl's head, he'd ordered Jake and Sam to search the girl and take away anything that could be used like a weapon. Sam scowled, well aware Jakee was shooting him a strange look. He knew he was sulking.

Sam had known the second the girl had stepped out of the front of that pharmacy store that things weren't going to go well for the kid. At first, Jack had just taken a passing interest in the girl, but seeing how stealthily she moved and how she'd almost—almost—gotten away from them undetected if it hadn't been for Sam spotting her, his interest was piqued, and all it had taken was one glance over on top of that alcove at his leader's face to know the kid was going to tag along with them. Sam should have known when Jack had ordered Jake to fire off that warning shot at her foot that there was no way his dad was just gonna let the fourteen year old walk the fuck away from that.

Jake had taken off her person a shiv, a baseball bat, which he could really make use of in their down time later on, and had rummaged through the kid's backpack, though not finding much other than food, and most of it was junk food. Jake rolled his eyes and scoffed, chucking the pack in the back seat of the truck with the rest of their stuff. The girl stirred once in her sleep, her lips parted open just slightly, and she said the asshole's name again.

"Stop…Joel…J…lemme…lemme go…I can…do this…" Then her voice trailed off, and the kid murmured something else, something incoherent and too low for either Jake or Sam to make out, and she fell silent, closing her mouth and turning her head to the right.

"You think the guy's her dad or something? He's not gonna be a problem for us if he comes looking for her, is he, Jack?" he asked, craning his neck and shifting at the waist slightly to look at their newest 'recruit' in the backseat of Jack's truck. Jake's frown deepened and the corners of his mouth turned downward. "Joel…why does that guy's name sound familiar." Jake's brows knitted together in confusion as he looked at the girl they'd kidnapped earlier.

Shockingly enough, the kid called Ellie was still knocked out the fuck cold, and probably wouldn't wake up for a while. Sam scowled and glanced up at Jack, who was driving, and bit the inside of his cheek. "Jesus Christ, Jack, did you really gotta go and hit the kid that fucking hard? She's only like, what, thirteen years old? Fucking take a look at her, she wasn't gonna do nothing to hurt us!" he growled, balling his shaking hand into a fist, and shoving it into his jacket pocket to control the shakes. "What if she like, fucking wakes up from this and doesn't remember shit?"

Jake and Sam both leaned over towards the middle of the backseat, where the girl's head was lolled back against the headrest. The kid had a nose kind of like one of those cartoon characters or something, Sam thought, or one drawn by a lazy artist, at least. The bridge of her nose was so low profile as to be barely there at all, and her nose was little more than a bump just above small pink, slightly chapped and bleeding lips. There was no two ways about it.

This girl was hella cute, and something about the way she'd handled herself earlier told Sam that she knew it, too. Ellie, if that was even her real name and not some fake name she'd given in a useless effort to protect herself, had hair that was a deep dark brown against pale skin that kind of reminded Jake and Sam of whipped milk.

Maybe that was why it kind of made it look like the hair on top of her hair in a low ponytail didn't belong to her, like some bizarre wig you'd see movie stars wear in the movies and TV shows or something. But by the way she'd tied it back with a few stray hairs sticking out, there was no question and none of their group doubted that it was all her hair.

Sam, the youngest in the group at twenty, furrowed his light blond brows into a frown and pursed his lips into a thin rigid line, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

Fuck, he wished he had a cigarette, just something to take this awful _edge_ off and control his goddamned hand tremors and body shakes, but Jack, their leader and the go-to guy for making all the rules in their group, kept all the smokes and all the other good stuff, like the best quality food, for himself, though every once in a blue moon, he would let Sam have a taste of beer from the cans they'd manage to swipe while on supply runs, even though his twenty-first birthday wasn't for a few more months, but with the world in shambles and no fuckin' cops around anymore to tell them what to do or arrest him for underage drinking, then who were they all to give a crap about that kind of thing?

Jack threw back his head from the driver's seat, his knuckles white around the steering wheel, and let out a short, almost bark-like laugh than sounded more like a noise an animal would make, like a dog. "This little bitch ain't gonna be a problem for us, kid, the hell you been smokin', huh? She's just one little fuckin' girl. Worst this little kid can do is run her little trash mouth and talk us to fuckin' death. We outnumber her, an' we're a helluva lot stronger than she fuckin' is, and we'll think of a use for her. Day we ever let a _kid_ get the better of us, I say we should all just fuckin' kill ourselves, cause that would be an embarrassment to man fuckin' kind, an' I know the kid was lyin' when she told us she had no one else. Maybe if someone does come lookin' after her sorry little ass and loudmouth, we can…barter some kinda trade. Supplies in exchange for her life or whatever else we fuckin' want. World's our goddamn oyster with no authorities or goddamned government in this part of the city. I ain't worked out all the details in my mind yet, but the wheels are turnin', and I'm gonna think of somethin'. I told you to quit doin' that garbage. You gotta have a clear head when we go on these supply runs, less you wanna end up like _that_ ," he growled, taking one of his hands off the steering wheel and gesturing towards a Stalker wandering the desolate road that led away from the innermost city and just towards the outskirts of town, where they had their group holed up in a couple of houses, but their main base of operations was an old warehouse. A lot more room that way.

Sam, who'd been sandwiched in the backseat, to the left of their newest captive, the girl in the middle because naturally, she was the smallest, and Jake, the biggest and toughest of their crew, to her right, just in case she woke up and decided to try anything stupid, since Jakee was the muscle around here, he'd set that shit straight in no time, took a look at where their group leader was pointing, and his gaze wandered towards the side of the road, to it.

The Stalker. You didn't really see these types too much out and about, these ones were rare. The doctors, the few that were left, all called it part of Stage 2 of the development of the infection strain, and for a person to turn into one of these abominations, it could take anywhere between a week to a month after passing the first stage. The people, what was left of them that weren't infected, called these ones stalkers because of the way they behaved.

They were the second stage of the Cordyceps Brain Infection. They were fucking dangerous too, with the speed and vision of the ones from the first stage, the Runners, but they also possessed the ferocity and almost unmatched strength of the Clickers. The horrible croaking noise they made from the backs of their throats was what gave them away, and they were a fucking eyesore to look at, with the beginnings of the fungal growth starting on the person's head and face, leaving them with only one good eye left out of which to see and hunt for unsuspecting victims as their fucking meals.

The way they hunted too was fucking terrifying, hence how they got their name. They would hide and take cover, and eventually close in on their target, and if the person they'd picked wasn't fast enough to make a run for it and shake them off their tail, then…goodbye. Done. That was it was. You were fucking toast.

Sam shuddered and swallowed. He could taste the bile coating in the back of his throat as he looked at it, and right as he got a good look at the thing, which had spotted their vehicle making its way down the path, Jack put his foot on the gas pedal and floored their truck forward, speeding on down the desolate road, and leaving the Stalker to wander the streets aimlessly.

"Just makin' a point, my friend," Jack called out to Sam and Jake from the front of the truck. "These are dangerous fuckin' times we live in now, and we all gotta do our part to adapt and change if we wanna survive."

Sam swallowed; his throat incredibly dry. He licked his lips in an effort to moisten them, and even in the chilly night air as they drove with the windows down, they still felt dry. Dry and hot, which he didn't really understand. The young twenty-year-old kid barely old enough to shave the two-day stubble around his jawline cocked his head to the side and looked at the kid.

 _Ellie, her name is Ellie. Fucking remember it and start using it. Might be the only way to get her to trust us. And keep her alive_ , he reminded himself and shook his head to clear it.

If they wanted her to trust them, they were gonna have to get used to calling her by her name instead of calling her 'girl' and 'kid' all the time. Sam pursed his lips and his gaze flitted between Jack in the driver's seat a couple of times and back towards the girl.

"What the hell are we gonna do with her, Jack?" Jake asked, breaking the silence, and asking the very question that Sam himself had been about to ask his dad, and Sam clamped his mouth shut and fell silent.

Jack's son hated that his dad seemed to genuinely enjoy toying with peoples' lives and emotions like this, kidnapping them and bringing them along, and he hated it even fucking more that the rest of the guys they ran with were willing to play long, and it's not like Sam could really speak up against his dad about what he _really_ thought.

Jake and Terry and Vic, Dad's friends, were even worse than his dad was sometimes whenever they brought a 'new person' into the group. They could get a little rough sometimes, and the last guy they'd brought back to the warehouse had wound up fucking dead, thanks to Jake.

Though luckily, and Sam really thought it was luck in this regard, they'd never actually taken a woman before, much less a fourteen-year-old girl, and he highly doubted his dad was just going to let Jake and Terry and the others do whatever the fuck they wanted to this kid. He hoped not.

Sam frowned as he couldn't seem to pull his eyes away from the still knocked out girl, berating himself for even thinking of entertaining the idea that once this kid woke up, she would want to stay with them.

Hell, for all he knew, that Joel guy she kept talking to her in sleep was her daddy or something, and she'd want to try to find him.

A suicide mission in Sam's mind. If he hadn't come for her now, he surely wasn't going to later. The poor asshole was probably long dead by now. Either shot by someone while out scouring for supplies, maybe, or had gotten bitten by one of the Infected and was well on his way to becoming like them.

Either way, Sam didn't think this Joel was going to be any kind of a problem for his dad. Especially if the kid wanted to stay alive, she'd learn to shut the fuck up while in his dad's company or else. He furrowed his brows into an even deeper frown, half tempted to poke her side in the ribcage and get her to wake up now and tell them what she wanted them to do with her. Probably she'd tell them to go fuck themselves and let her go, but his dad wasn't going to allow that.

Finally, Jack's voice cut through the almost unnatural silence, and Sam jumped, already forgotten that Jake had asked Sam's dad a question. He turned around, a guilty, furtive look on his face and visibly winced, hoping his dad hadn't noticed that he'd sort of been distracted looking at this girl.

He couldn't quite explain it, but even asleep, something about the kid intrigued him. He liked to think if he'd ever had a little sister or someone, he would have been a good mentor figure. Maybe this girl would give their group a chance and stick around for a little while.

"Ain't figured that out yet, Jake, but we'll see what the fuck kinda attitude she gives us when she wakes up."

Terry was the next one to offer his two cents, and his words chilled Sam's blood, rendering it frozen in his veins.

"Maybe we shoulda just killed her back there. Put a bullet right between the eyes and been done with her."

Sam bit the inside of his cheeks as he felt his eyes widen. Sam had always known Terry was an asshole. He could always talk of nothing but killing people, even back before the world went to shit, turns out he'd done it for a living, and used to be some kind of specialized hit man or something for a gang, but he'd never harmed a girl, much less a _kid_ , and didn't think Terry would stoop that fucking low, though he supposed he shouldn't be surprised.

Terry wasn't exactly winning humanitarian of the year awards. He shot Terry a scathing look, a muscle in his jaw twitching, though given Terry was riding shotgun with his dad in the front seat, he totally missed the look.

He scowled harder at his dad's friend's answer, folding his arms across his chest, and glaring out the window of their truck. This girl was already shaping up to be a huge pain in the ass and Sam didn't really even know Ellie all that well.

He could tell he was going to have to keep an eye on her, _two_ eyes, as often as he could spare them, just so Jake and Terry didn't try something fucking dumb when his back was turned. He turned back towards the girl. Ellie.

Unable to help himself, and no longer feeling like his shaking fucking hands were taking directions from his own mind, Sam felt himself lean down and brush a lock of her hair that had come loose from her ponytail off to the side, to see the huge fucking bruise forming on the side of the girl's temple and her forehead.

It was definitely going to leave one hell of a mark. His dad had hit the girl really hard, and Sam didn't really think the violence was called for.

A small cut with a little dab of dried blood forming in the middle of that bruise only emphasized just how much of a dick Jack could be at times. There was a reason growing up that Sam had never called his father 'Dad.'

His daddy growing up, at least, before the world had gone to hell in a hand basket, had always been a drinker. It's how Sam got his bruises and the scars that littered his arms, torso, and back that he hid underneath thick t-shirts.

But what hurt Sam the worst, even to this day at the ripe age of twenty years old was the goddamned insecurity. The internal brokenness and shattered sense of self that only someone exposed to the kind of shit and mental and physical abuse that Sam had been put through growing up could really experience.

Pain that no one else saw, because no fucking cared to see, or if they did care, they had never bothered to fucking ask Sam if he was okay.

There were nights when Sam as a kid would lay in bed listening to the sound of his parents fighting, stuff sometimes would be thrown. His mom, Kim, would shout, and Jack would begin laying into her and that's when the screaming and the sounds of what would always sound suspiciously like throwing glass would start.

His mom would cry, his dad would seethe and scream and rage, and all Sam could really do was push his face into the long toy snake his three-year-old body was wrapped around.

As he got older, and the fighting grew even worse, by the time he was ten years old, Sam would think to himself how whenever Mom left, then he would go with her too. Flee this god's asshole of a city, flee the fucking violence and endless rants from Dad.

Then one day, she did leave…and Sam remained right where he was with just a toy plush snake to comfort him. He was only ten years old.

Sam was jolted out of his mind's unpleasant wandering and his gaze drifted back towards Ellie's bruise. He grimaced as he looked at it. It looked pretty fucking painful and she was definitely going to be feeling that for a day or two, and they didn't even have any Tylenol or pain relievers they could give her in the meantime for it.

The twenty-year-old jerked his hand back away from the brunette's face when a small, muffled whimper came from her lips. For a split second, the fourteen-year-old girl's eyelids fluttered open as though she was struggling to decide if she wanted to wake the hell up or slip back into her unconscious state, but as soon as her eyes flung open and she realized what was happening, how her hands had been bound by a pair of blue plastic zip ties, and she was sandwiched in the middle of an unfamiliar vehicle's backseat with two guys who were essentially strangers to her, she bolted upright, flinching away from Sam and shrinking down into her seat as far as she possibly could, immediately starting to struggle to free her hands from the zip ties that bound them together, biting at them.

"What in the actual fuck?" the girl named Ellie screamed, though given how hoarse her voice sounded, like she hadn't had water in a couple of days, Sam kind of thought it was a miracle she could speak at all, let alone while biting at her restraints. "You assholes lemme go! Turn this fucking car around right the fuck now you pieces of shit, and drop me off, I don't care where it is! I'll fucking walk back if I gotta, but don't make me go with you bunch of cocksuckers. What kinda sick shit is this? You kidnapping girls and women for some kinda harem or something? I'm fourteen fucking years old, whatever the fuck you assholes wanna do to me is fucking pedophilia, assholes! I don't wanna go with you jerks, just let me _go_. **NOW**!' she shouted, all of the color rapidly draining from her face.

Jack laughed, though there was no warmth in his voice, and his voice sounded cold. "Not very nice, doll, talkin' to your guardian angels that way. I coulda let you die back there when that Clicker was comin' up behind you on your six, an' you didn't even fuckin' notice 'cause you weren't payin’ close enough goddamned attention. Don't fuckin' scream or I'll drop you off someplace, you little _bitch_ , and it ain't gonna be a place you'll particularly like. How 'bout right in the path of a Bloater or a Stalker? I think I see one a few clicks up ahead, I can fuckin' _make_ that happen. An' we took your weapons. Let's see how fucking proud you are then." He glanced at Ellie in the rearview mirror and smirked at the dawning expression of outrage on her too-pale features. "Don't gimme that look, sweetheart. You know I'm right. I know you're lyin' about bein' on your own. Kid like you has gotta have someone watchin' your back. You wouldn't last two days on your own otherwise, girl. Maybe it's this _Joel_ you kept mention' in your sleep? Who the fuck is Joel? Your little boyfriend or something? Your daddy? An uncle or someone, maybe?" he taunted cruelly.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sam watched as whatever color was left in Ellie's face totally drained. Sam watched, carefully making sure his face remained set to 'neutral.'

Growing up with his asshole of a dad over the years, he'd managed to master his poker face and made sure no one could tell his true emotions, what he was thinking.

It was just easier that way. He watched as over a dozen emotions flickered through the girl's eyes all at once, ranging from being super pissed off at the pair of them for kidnapping her while she'd been knocked out, to scared shitless out of her goddamned little mind as thoughts of the unknown flitted through her mind, at what they might do to her if she refused to cooperate. Sam spoke up quietly, hoping to ease the tension in the vehicle.

Jake let out a low warning growl from the back of his throat, and Sam could hear the girl swallow a lump in her throat as Jake whipped his gun out of its holster and cocked it, aiming the barrel of the gun straight at her, pressing it firmly against her forehead, watching and seeming like he was relishing in watching as the beads of sweat formed on the girl's brow, her huge, doe-like eyes darting to the left and right, probably wondering if she could risk jumping out of the car and making a run for it. Sam knew the others knew it too, that Ellie wouldn't get very far.

Sam could have sworn she heard the kid whimper, and he knew her smart mouth was all just a bunch of talk. Nothing but bullshit, but that didn't mean he wanted to see the kid's brain matter splattered all over the car.

"Jake, put the fucking gun away. She's not gonna do anything, goddamn it! Where the hell you think she's gonna go, huh?" he shouted, balling his hands into fists to prevent himself from lashing out at the bigger man in anger. Last thing they needed was a scuffle in the backseat and the gun accidentally going off and blowing a hole in the roof of his dad's truck. Or worse. Their heads.

Jake shot Sam a look but ignored the younger man's words, instead turning back towards Ellie, his lips pulled backward to reveal almost unnaturally pointed razor sharp canines and yellowing gums, from all the cigarettes he smoked. "You talk a big talk, sweet cheeks, but it's all just a buncha bullshit. How 'bout I show you what you had for breakfast this morning?" Jake smirked as Ellie let out a tiny breathy little squeak and dropped her gaze to her lap. Jake's triumphant smirk widened, and he scoffed and rolled his eyes, addressing Jack next. "Jack, this is a pain in the ass. This girl ain't gonna be nothin' but _trouble_ for us all, you mark my goddamned words right here and now. I say we kneecap this pussy an' leave her somewhere for one of the infected to find and eat. Ain't no way she'll help."

Jack scowled, and when he spoke to Jake, his voice was clipped and hard. Sam could tell his dad was rapidly losing his patience. "You ain't makin' a mess in _my_ truck, boy. You wanna get up to your usual shit, save it for inside, but she's under my protection unless I say otherwise, and I don't want you touchin' her. Is that clear?"

Jake furrowed his brows into a frown but quickly nodded, though Sam could tell Jake was royally pissed off, and Sam would probably be paying for it later. Jake often took out his anger on Sam since he couldn't very well hit the leader of their group whenever Jack made a decision that Jake didn't necessarily agree with was the right one.

Sam felt himself stiffen involuntarily at Jake's words. They were almost there, and if he could calm the kid down long enough for Jack to explain what he wanted, then maybe they could avoid a situation. "There's no use fighting us on this, Ellie," he informed the girl, trying to keep his shaking voice stern but also as nonthreatening as possible. If they were going to have even a fool's hope that she would want to stay with them, they needed her on their side. "Just wasting your energy," Sam pointed out, shrugging his shoulders in a nonchalant gesture. He bit the inside of his cheek and watched.

Ellie stared back at Sam, probably fixating on him instead of Jake, because he could tell Jake's towering, hulking build like a former pro football player terrified her to no end, and Sam was the closest to her own age, older than her by only fix or six years or so.

Her eyes were brimming with un-shed tears, and when her lips parted slightly as she opened her mouth to try to fire off yet another smart-ass retort, all that came out was an indecipherable groan, followed by a panicked little whimper as she felt the cold metal of the barrel of Jake's gun travel gently downwards, from her forehead where it came to rest on her chest, pointed straight to her heart.

"Jake, there's no need for that. Put the fucking gun away, she's not gonna fuckin' run away. We're in the middle of fuckin' nowhere in the country right now, she can't fuckin' escape. What the hell do you need your gun for?" Sam knitted his brows together in confusion and suspicion as he watched Jake shoot him a dark glowering look full of malice and scathing hatred, but he quickly holstered the weapon and folded his meaty arms across his chest.

Ellie let out another muffled whine as she bit the inside of her cheek and turned towards Sam, once again probably only doing it to appeal to his sense of humanity and the relative closeness of somebody her age. If Sam had to guess, Ellie probably picked him because since he was so close to her age, that he hadn't been affected by the brutal ways of this world yet. Well, she would be wrong in that regard. So very fucking wrong. He already had.

Ellie, Sam, and Jake all let out muffled yelps from the backseat of the truck as the truck fishtailed and skidded to an unexpected halt, Jack not having warned them he had been planning to slam on the fucking brakes. "HEY!"

The girl began shouting pretty much any curse word she could think of, though she froze when she saw where they had stopped in front of. They'd finally made it back to base camp, and Sam cringed as he heard Ellie swallow.

She turned towards Sam, a look of pure, unadulterated horror in her eyes. He didn't even have to look to know what she saw.

The Bloater his dad had somehow managed to capture and avoid being bitten, and now kept chained up to a pole in the front of the warehouse as his prized trophy and to set an example, as a clear warning to any potential intruders to back the fuck off and stay the hell away.

"What kinda sick fucking bullshit is this? Is this some kinda sick fucking frat bullshit or something? I—is this a _test_? I—I don't understand!" Ellie screamed, though the way her voice had gone up an octave and strangely sounded much smaller though she was yelling, coming from a place of fear, Sam could tell she was scared.

Ellie made a show of violently shirking away as Jack clambered out of the driver seat of his truck and aggressively wrenched open the door of the back passenger seat, yanking Ellie out of the car, grabbing onto her forearm and pushing her forward roughly, their path heading straight towards the Bloater, stopping within mere inches of an arm's length reach of the huge, hulking Bloater, whose thick neck was wrapped around a chain multiple times.

"LET GO OF ME!" the girl screamed, digging the heels of her sneakers into the gravel, fighting Jack tooth and nail as he dragged her towards the captive Bloater, though the group leader turned a deaf ear to her desperate pleas.

"Not a chance in hell, girl. You talk back to me, this is kinda shit you got to look forward to livin' here with us."

"Please!" Ellie's voice rose in volume, and Sam clambered out of the truck, feeling like his legs were about to give out on him. This wasn't what he had thought his dad had intended. Jack had made no fucking mention of this.

Jack ignored Ellie's pleas, and steadied her by firmly gripping a strong hand on her shoulder, cupping her chin in his hand, and tilting it upwards sharply, forcing the teenager to look him dead square in the eyes and meet his gaze.

"I've had enough of your fuckin' bullshit, kid. We save your goddamn life, an' all you've done to us is run your little trash mouth. You should learn to respect the adults in this world, kid. Others ain't gonna be so _nice_ like me."

The girl let out a terrified squeak as the Bloater made a lunging grab, and would have had a hold on her too, had Jack not grabbed Ellie at the last possible minute and sidestepped her out of the way, out of the maximum reach that the chain keeping the infected tethered to the pole's column could extend, and she didn't bother to blink back tears.

 _"Please_!" Ellie repeated as her voice rose in volume, and she definitely sounded like she was going to burst into tears, and Sam watched, as a single tear tract rolled down her pale cheek. "You—th—this is fucking _insane_!"

She tugged uselessly at the zip ties, straining against the restraints, blood running over the translucent plastic, red on white. She bit the inside of her cheek and then stuck out her bottom lip in a slight pout, starting to cry silently.

Surely, Joel was looking for her. He just fucking had to. He wouldn't just…he wouldn't just _leave_ her here.

 _…Would he?_ Ellie blinked as she realized Jack had said something to her, and she fought back the urge to burst into a full fledged sobbing hysterical meltdown.

"…that's real fuckin' cute, honey, but pouting like that ain't gonna save your sorry little ass," Jack growled darkly, his fingers curling into a tight, painful grip on her right forearm.

Ellie let out a whimper as she peeked her head over Jack's shoulder at the Bloater, cringing at the snapping sound of its jaws, bone against flesh. She could hear the bones in its stiffened neck creak as it turned its monstrous head in the direction of their voices.

Ellie swallowed hard past the lump forming in her throat and returned her gaze back to Jack, whose lips were pursed into such a thin line and his dark eyebrows shot so far up onto his forehead that they almost disappeared into his hairline.

"Please, guy. Just let me go. J—Jack, you said your name is Jack?" she asked pitifully, biting her bottom lip again, a nervous habit of hers, Sam noticed, and if she kept that shit up she wasn't going to have a lip by the end of the night, she'd have bitten the whole goddamned thing off until it bled.

Jack nodded, though he did not respond.

"Okay." Ellie exhaled a shaking breath through her nose, and glanced towards Sam, and it sent a weird pang of…something welling through his chest, though he wasn't quite sure what that emotion was. Guilt? Regret?

But Sam had no time to ponder it as Ellie swiveled her head back around to meet his dad's.

Ellie looked like she was on the verge of having a total mental breakdown. "Let me go, man. I—I don't have anything useful. Your other guys already took all of my weapons and my backpack. I don't have anything left for you guys to take, a—and I'm not a good fighter. Fucking look at me, I'm just a girl! Not even sixteen yet! You have no reason to keep me here like this a—and you know it, asshole, so just let me go, _please_!"

She blinked back more tears that threatened to spill over and waited for the group's leader to say something to her. Ellie let out a hiss as she inhaled a breath of cool night air and ground her teeth in anticipation, knowing full well she was lying through her teeth. She was a good fighter.

No small part in thanks to Joel, who'd managed to teach her a thing or two, but that wasn't going to help her out here now. Not with her being stripped of her weapons and she was outnumbered, 4 to 1, and then the Bloater. Ellie swallowed hard past the lump in her throat as she looked towards the group leader.

"Please, man. You _know_ this isn't fucking right. Just let me go…"

When Jack looked down his nose at Ellie, Ellie immediately found herself wishing that he'd kept his trance on his crew of guys behind the pair of them, all of them silent and wide-eyed, watching if their leader would really feed a fourteen-year-old kid to a Bloater to make an example out of someone who dared to talk back to his authority. Deliberation was fucking over. The creep had judged her already and, in his eyes, Ellie only saw a cold hatred.

She swallowed and her face fell as Jack locked his eyes on hers. There was a tenseness in them the guy wasn't even trying to fucking mask. She stumbled, trying to back away as Jack slowly advanced on her, a predatory look in his eyes. Nothing about this was making any fucking sense, not the guy's curling fists or the anger that radiated in his eyes. All she knew as she looked into Jack's eyes was that she didn't like how the group leader was looking at her.

She was in a very big spot of trouble, and without Joel here to protect her, she was well and truly fucked…


	3. Worth the Risk

**CHAPTER THREE**

Ellie let out a pained whimper. She could hardly fucking believe this. What kind of sick fucking group would keep a goddamned Bloater of all things, tethered to fucking chain links to a pole basically in their front yard? Like it was some kind of…pet? Like a dog that they'd keep up chained in the yard in a doghouse. Like a display.

_Warning, warning, it's a warning_ , her mind offered, unhelpfully too. _A warning for strangers to stay away_.

_They're insane. Nuts. Not right in the head. Need to escape, need to flee_. Her mind was screaming at her to do _something_ , anything to get the fuck out of here and try to get back to what she had set out to do in the first place: find Joel, but even now, as she met Jack's gaze, and could see the other guys looming behind the pair of them, she knew there was no way out of this little mess she'd gotten herself into.

Ellie was exhausted and practically tripping over her own feet as she struggled to get away from Jack's ironclad grip. For one inappropriate second, she wondered if this dude had been like, a bodybuilder or lifted weights or something in another life, because she'd never met a guy that had a firm grip quite like this. Not even Joel's strength matched this fucking asshole's.

"Let go of me!" Ellie screamed in a breathless voice as she fought to slap Jack's hand away and scrambled back further away from him, putting as much distance between herself and Jack and that huge Bloater as she could, but she let out a squeak and froze as she felt the cold metal barrel of someone, probably that big blond guy, Jake's gun, pointed directly at the small of her back, at her spine. One shot to the back and she'd go down in an instant, paralyzed, just like Barbara Gordon in the _Batman_ comic books she loved to read so much in her free time.

Her breaths felt uneven and frequently interrupted by half-choking sobs as she stared up at the leader with wide, frightened eyes and tried to shrink away from what was meant to be a kind gesture as she felt Jack put a hand on her shoulder. "Get your fucking hands _off_ of me!" she shouted. " **LET GO**!" Ellie shouted, balling her hands into fists.

She clenched her eyes shut tight as she felt the barrel of Jake's gun dig deeper into the back of her red t-shirt. Ellie winced as she felt both of Jack's strong hands come up to grip tightly onto both of her shoulders, and if she wasn't convinced that she'd get a hole blown through her spine if she were to try, she would have reached over and bitten the team's leader on his hand if it meant it would get his creepy, groping claws off of her shoulder.

"I'm helpin' you, you goddamned little brat. Now hold the fuck still an' stop fuckin' fighting me on this or I'm gonna fuckin' hit you, an' you're not gonna like it when _my_ hand flies. Hold still, goddamn it, and shut the fuck up," Jack growled, his fingers curling into tight fists on either of Ellie's shoulders, which really fucking hurt. With a soft whimper, the girl finally quit squirming beneath his hold and held still, but it did nothing to quell the shaking of her limbs, or the quite frankly kind of adorable little pout she was giving to Jack and the others, her silent way of pleading for any one of them to show her just an ounce of kindness and help her out of this situation. "The fuck is wrong with you, you goddamned little bitch?" he asked, though he finally relinquished his grip on Ellie's shoulder.

Ellie bit her bottom lip hard enough that it almost split, cracking open and bleeding, but she ignored the pain.

"Please, guys," she begged, raising her hands in front of her as a last ditch form of self-defense. Joel's advice continued to resonate within the confines of her mind, and she hesitated as her gaze locked eyes with the leader.

_Talk to 'em, baby girl_ , Joel was telling her, and she really wished he were physically here with her right now so he could pop a cap in every single one of these assholes foreheads, right between their eyes, and get on with life.

"Let me go," she pleaded, not removing her gaze from Jack's, though the fact that the guy called Jake still had his gun pointed in her back, and the youngest guy, Sam, who she guessed was kind of cute, if she'd been interested in guys, hadn't so much as made a move or lifted a finger or said anything to get these creeps off her hadn't, told her that she was all on her own here and would get no help from any one of them. "I—I was alone back there," she blurted out immediately, and visibly cringed, thinking she'd just shot herself in the foot by telling the truth.

The big beefy blond one that looked like a football player, Jake, rolled his eyes and folded his arms across his chest. "Good. Then you don't got a reason to leave," the man countered with a raspy sounding laugh.

Ellie frowned. It sounded like the guy was a pack a day smoker with that kind of hoarse voice, which she thought was strange since smokes and other luxuries like that were pretty hard for folks to come by these days. Or so she thought. Maybe she'd been wrong in that regard. Whatever. It didn't fucking matter. What _did_ matter was the way Jake was looking at her, with a strange mischievous glint in his eyes that she wasn't entirely sure that she liked.

"I—I w—was looking for someone wh—when you guys found me," Ellie stammered, feeling the heat creep to her cheeks as a light pink blush speckled along her cheeks. She figured she was already fucking kidnapped and the guy was threatening to give her a very painful death by allowing the Bloater to eat her from the inside out if she didn't cooperate with them all and start giving them answers, so she guessed she might as well tell them whatever the fuck they wanted to know if it meant that she would stay alive for just another minute longer. And hopefully…

_Hopefully Joel will come and take you the fuck away from this place and get out of here, just the two of you_ , her conscience thought, and even just _thinking_ his name was enough to cause fresh tears to well and form in her eyes, stinging and blurring her vision, though she swallowed down hard past the lump forming in her throat and blinked back the briny, salty tears. She swallowed and continued. "I was on my way out of the city when you guys found me. I gotta find my—my guy," Ellie added, hoping she could show this group of guys she wasn't interested in any sort of territory their crew had probably laid claim to. Maybe they thought she was an intruder or something.

Jack pursed his lips into a thin line. The group's leader was looking less than pleased at the mention of another man, and more than a little pissed. "Your guy, huh? The fella's name happen to be Joel, by any chance?" He smirked, keeping his arms folded across his chest as he leaned against the bed of his truck, amused to hell as he watched Ellie's already pale face drain of color, looking like a deer that had been caught in the headlights of an oncoming car and not sure what the fuck to do. "You mighta mentioned the guy's name in your sleep, dollface."

She could feel her hackles raise at the name-calling, though she bit back about ten cuss words that flitted through her mind and decided to let it go. She figured it wouldn't help her situation by cussing these assholes out, even if they did deserve it, after all. They were the ones who'd fucking kidnapped her, not the other way around.

Ellie blinked, biting the inside of her cheek, not sure how much of her time spent with Joel she could reveal.

"Y—yeah," she stammered, though it escaped her lips as more of a whisper and she cast her head down to the ground, staring at the tips of her sneakers, not wanting to meet Jack's cold, calculating gaze for a third time.

"That right?" Jack scowled and folded his arms across his chest, leaning against the back of the cargo bed of his truck. "Who the fuck is this Joel guy to you, huh? Your daddy? Uncle? Boyfriend? Cousin? C'mon, sweetheart. Talk to us. We're your…friends. You can tell us the truth. You cooperate an' play nice, we ain't gonna hurt ya."

_Bullshit_. "He's…" Ellie paused and blinked twice, suddenly unsure of how to answer his question. What exactly _was_ Joel to her, anyways? A friend? A sort of adopted father? _What_? Even Ellie was having trouble wrapping around just what exactly her relationship was to Joel these days, and that didn't even include the fact that Joel was mysterious missing in action. They'd been traveling for several months now together, and had gotten to grow pretty close to one another, though not without their rough spots. Joel did truly seem to care for her, in his own way, even if they'd had a rocky relationship from the very beginning, with Joel seeing Ellie at the start of all things as nothing more than a burden, just another 'cargo package' to drop off at the rendezvous point. And then they'd gone through some stuff together, with Joel saving Ellie's life on more than one occasion, constantly having her back.

_Joel_. Even now, Ellie worried for Joel. Things she felt she should have done, or said to him while she'd had the time, and now he might not even be alive anymore, coupled with all her perceived failures trying to make it in this world dominated Ellie's mind, and as she felt her lips part open to speak to give what she hoped would be an apt response to Jack's question, all that came out was a strangle attempt at speech. Finally, after a long pause, she spoke.

"A friend," she croaked out hoarsely. "Sort of like my dad, I guess, if I'm being honest. He…found me." Ellie allowed her voice to fade as she bit her lip and looked away for a moment before returning her gaze back to Jack.

Ellie swallowed hard as she thought about her past actions and words, the shit she'd said to Joel whenever she was angry. _Our fight about Sarah_ , she thought and immediately felt a stab of guilt prick at her heart and she shifted her backpack onto her shoulder and tried not to jump as she heard the back door of Jack's truck slam shut, as Jake had finally removed his gun from her spine and had gone to fetch their bags and haul they'd been out looting, one of which included Ellie's backpack when they'd stolen, which Jake shot a look of disgust before tossing it at her feet.

The shit she'd said to Joel was inadequate that day. Festering guilt still sometimes rendered her mind ineffective, like it was doing right now, and in especially bad moments, moments like right now, the dark demonic voice that lurked in the back of her mind found its way to the forefront of her mind and tended to whisper things to her.

It whispered things to her like, _Everything has gone to shit. It's terrible. No way back. Disaster. Ruin. Your fault. Your fault Joel is missing, you should have gone with him and made sure he came back to you alive. Ruined. He was your only hope of getting to the Fireflies, and without him by your side, you're well and truly fucked._

The world all of a sudden seemed closer to Ellie and the cold night air felt like it was becoming soup to the young fourteen-year-old, way harder for her breathe, and she didn't even suffer from asthma or anything like that.

Ellie exhaled slowly through her nose and breathed in sharp, shaking breaths as she stared up at Jack, only one question burning on the tip of her tongue that was practically begging to be asked, and she just had to know.

"Y—you guys…aren't with them?" she whispered, biting her bottom lip, and staring wide-eyed at Jack.

"With fuckin' _who_ , bitch?" Jack growled, his lips pursing into a thin line. "You want some answers, you gotta start being more specific. Jesus fucking Christ," he snapped, looking like he was resisting the urge to roll his eyes.

" _Them_." Ellie was surprised at how uncertain her voice sounded so small and timid as she looked nervously behind herself for half a second, wondering why it was that Jake didn't pull his gun on her again, or if they were going to throw her to the Bloater for food, they should just quit their stalling and just fucking do it already, the ambiguity of not knowing was fucking killing her. "W—with D—David and his other guys. You're—you're not with them, are you?" she croaked out hoarsely, surprised she could even find her fucking voice, let alone speak the asshole's name whose fucking face and creepy sadistic grin haunted her nightmares.

"I have no idea who the fuck that is or what the hell you're talkin' about, kiddo. Knew a David once back at the power plant I used to work at. That asshole was one of the first ones to go when folks started eatin' each other when the virus started spreadin'," Jack growled. "That's the only David I ever knew, an' probably ever gonna."

"O—oh." Ellie exhaled a shaking breath, feeling her shoulders slump in relief, though there was a small part of her that felt relieved, knowing these guys probably weren't part of the Jakee fucking cannibal group David led.

One encounter with that group was more than enough for Ellie. She visibly winced and blinked, forcing thoughts of David and his group to the back of her mind for now. Ellie had more important things to deal with.

Like figuring out how to stay the fuck alive right here and now.

Jack frowned as he looked the girl over. He was starting to think it had been a mistake, taking the girl and bringing her here. Maybe she really _was_ all alone and didn't have folks looking out for her like he'd initially thought. He exhaled in frustration as the girl glanced nervously over Jack's shoulder towards the Bloater.

"It ain't gonna bite you," Jack growled angrily. "Long as you don't get within grabbin' reach, which you _won't_ ," he emphasized, leaning forward slightly so the tip of his slender nose that had been broken a time or two in days long gone by, was practically touching hers, "unless you do somethin' fuckin' _stupid_ to piss me off. So, don't do it. I'm only gonna say that once. Think of that as your one an' only warnin' sweetheart. I ain't gonna tell you this shit twice. You can ask any of my boys here, I hate sayin' shit twice. If I gotta, I get really _ticked_. You play _nice_ with all us guys, then you could have a good life here. But fuck shit up for yourself and…well, old Fatso over here is gonna have himself a nice little snack," Jack growled threateningly as he glanced behind at the tethered Bloater chained up.

Ellie swallowed and continued that infuriating behavior of looking around. Jack barely stifled the low warning growl that was forming in the back of his throat, threatening to escape. He wished the kid would just cut the shit.

"D—do you know of any…any other… _nice_ groups," here, she cringed, thinking that she'd said something wrong, and was immediately rewarded for her little slip of the tongue with a violent push forward from Jake, "that would let me stay with them for a couple of days? N—nice people?" Ellie stammered, immediately lowering her gaze. She swallowed past the lump in her throat and tried to ignore the Bloater's groaning noises behind Jack.

Jack narrowed his eyes and scrutinized the girl's simple appearance. It seemed like she'd been telling them the truth then, at the very least. The kid probably wasn't a plant by FEDRA to weed out the types the government deemed 'a threat,' of which Jack and his boys liked to think that they were, but they lacked the numbers to take FEDRA on head on, though maybe one day with enough impressive powers of expansion, they'd be able to do it.

"Most people these days ain't just gonna let some random kid off the streets join their group, girl. Folks today are more worried 'bout fendin' for themselves than going outta their way for somebody else when there ain't nothin' in it for them. If you don't benefit, it ain't worth the risk, you feel me? Somethin' you'll learn the hard way, kid…"

Ellie lowered her gaze and mumbled something incoherent. Jack frowned. "How the fuck did you make it this long even, kid? How the hell you live this long an' you ain't dead or bitten yet, huh? How old are you, anyway, kid? Thirteen? Fifteen? Ain't no fuckin' way you lived this long without some kinda help. So, tell me how the fuck you stayed alive this long, little girl. What the fuck did you do, mooch off other people? Sit in a safe little room all holed up nice an' cozy while everyone else looked after you? Goddamn, girl, you ain't little no more. Time for you to grow a fuckin' backbone or you ain't gonna last in this fuckin' sick psychotic world, kid." He scowled and folded his arms across his thick chest, and Ellie glanced up and noticed a small carton of cigarettes sticking out of the front pocket of his black and red plaid shirt. "Well?" he growled, noticing Ellie stammer trying to think of a response.

"N—no," Ellie confessed. "I—it wasn't like that. Me and my…partner," she finished lamely, biting her lip, "I'm good at supply runs and stuff," she said, reaching up a trembling hand to tuck a lock of brown hair that had come undone from her ponytail back behind her ear. "You guys have seen me move. Up on those roofs back there."

She bit the inside of her cheek, Joel's voice filling her mind, guiding her on how to stay alive though he wasn't even here. _That's real good, Ellie. Keep talkin', stall these pricks long enough to stay alive. Say whatever they want._

"Look, man, I just wanna find my…dad, and get the hell outta dodge. I don't want any trouble, 'kay? You guys already took whatever I had in my backpack. Just…just take it and lemme go but give my goddamned fucking backpack back. I don't care if you empty it or whatever, but I want it fucking back. You can at least gimme my pack back, I'm not gonna fucking try to steal your shit, guys. Why the fuck would I? I can't hurt you guys. I'm not a fucking threat. I'm just a kid. Please. I'm fucking _begging_ you here. Let me go. I—I won't tell anyone you're here. I swear." She swallowed hard past the lump forming in her throat and glanced up nervously at Jack, and then to Jake and Sam. Jack and Jake and the other one, Terry, were looking all kinds of royally fucking pissed, but Sam…the guy was close to her age and there was something in his expression that Ellie couldn't quite identity. Like…pity or something. There was a strange melancholic look in his eyes, and also fury too, though if she had to guess it wasn't because of her mouthing off to everyone. Almost kind of like he felt sorry for her, maybe.

Good. If he did, and if she had once chance of making at least one friend in this otherwise garbage dump of a situation, she was going to try her hand with Sam a little bit later, assuming they hadn't fucking killed her by then.

The leader, Jack, though, she could tell the guy had some kind of beef with. Ellie furrowed her brows into a frown and blinked, jumping, and turning back towards Jack as the loud sound of the leader clearing his throat rent the otherwise silent air, save for the groaning and moaning of the Bloater. "Motherfucker…" she growled, hissing it in a low whisper, her eyes narrowing as she had to stand slightly on her tiptoes and peer over Jack's shoulder at the captured Bloater. This one had been infected a long time; she could tell.

"You like him?" the guy called Terry piped up, his tone sounding sickeningly excited, like he was enjoying contemplating the idea of feeding Ellie to the fucking infected Bloater and watching, ignoring or either completely oblivious to the dark look Jack shot him. He was grinning almost unnaturally wide, like that creepy fucking Cheshire Cat from that _Alice in Wonderland_ story one of the adults in the camps had told her and some of the other kids growing up. Ellie swallowed and nervously shook her head, dipping her head in fear, allowing a lock of dark hair to fall in front of her face and effectively shield her line of sight from Terry, the one who, if she was being honest with herself here for a second, in the short time that she'd regained consciousness, freaked her out the most.

"No." The word escaped her as more of a low growl and she felt her hands ball into fists as she lifted her chin.

"No?" Terry mocked, spreading his arms wide and taking a step or two forward, to the left of Jack, who shot an eyebrow at his comrade but made no further comment. "Why the fuck not, little bitch? We call this asshole Brutus, after the guy that stabbed Caesar in Rome like a fuckin' million years ago or some shit. He's kinda our guard dog."

Ellie felt her heart sink to the pit of her stomach and her eyes go wide and round. _Oh, god, they fucking NAMED it_. _These people are fucking nuts. Sooner you get the hell outta here, the better_. She clenched her jaw and ground her teeth in anger, closing her eyes for a half a second, trying to get her temper under control. "So, get a _goddamned fucking actual dog_! This shit is fucking _disgusting_ , anybody with half a brain cell could see that, but it's clear you don't have any at all, you psychotic sick son of a bitch! That's so gross!" bellowed Ellie, her face reddening, the words pouring out of her mouth like poison before she could so much as stop herself saying it.

Ellie closed her eyes and exhaled a shaking, trembling breath that felt like it simply didn't want to return to her lungs. Fuck, she felt lightheaded and really fucking dizzy all of a sudden. Was this stress? Or did something happen?

_Poison_ , her mind raced unhelpfully, as black spots danced in front of her vision in waves and ebbs, the flow and tide of drifting into sweet unconsciousness again tormenting Ellie, who hadn't slept good once since Joel went MIA.

_Oh my God, did they fucking poison me with something while I was out? Drugs. Drugs, is this…am I drugged?_

Her throat felt like it was closing off, cutting off circulation and air to her passageways, and she probably would have crumpled to the damn ground if the young one her age, Sam, didn't rush forward to grip onto her arm as she shot out an arm for something to grab onto. She balked at the unwanted contact, but strangely enough his strong grip on her arm, while tight and showed no signs of letting her go, it felt…nice. Warm…almost safe, but not quite.

Jack ignored Ellie's growing physical discomfort and regarded the young girl as though she were an interesting specimen of infected behind some fucking cage in a zoo, not a scared, frightened kid who was out of her element.

Because, let's face it, without Joel by her side, she felt freaking lost and more scared than she'd care to admit, though she couldn't let these crazy motherfuckers know that. These assholes had kidnapped her, given her one hell of a beating to the back of her skull that still fucking pounded and throbbed. She was going to have one hell of a welt and it was probably going to hurt for at least a few days, she figured. Then they'd stripped her of her weapons, so she had nothing to defend herself with, all of these assholes looked like they belonged on a football team, except for the kid in his early twenties. He didn't seem so bad, but the rest? Big, beefy guys that looked like they were more muscle and brawn than brains, they'd taken her backpack, for all she knew on the car ride over to where they were…wherever this was, they'd eaten all the chips and cookies she'd swiped. And not only that, but then…the group's leader had gone off of his fucking goddamned rocker. They'd almost fed her to a fucking pet Bloater, for Christ's sake! It was then that Ellie concluded that whoever these guys were, whatever this group called themselves, they were way worse than that pack of cannibals she'd encountered back in the woods a couple weeks ago. Way fucking worse. Luckily, she was saved the trouble of responding or coming up with something to say by Jack.

"So. You said you're good at supply runs, huh?" he commented, talking more to himself as he mumbled it than to Ellie, and Ellie furrowed her brows into a frown as Jack started pacing in front of her, rubbing the two day stubble on his beard, like he was contemplating something pretty damn heavy, and lost in an important thought.

"Yeah." She shrugged her shoulders and hoped her face remained neutral. "I'm the fastest, so I'm the fucking best at it." Ellie glanced down and pointed at her chest. "I'm just a fucking kid. My…adopted dad is like, in his forties or something and getting kinda old," she confessed, ignoring the sniggering Terry and Jake shot each other.

Terry couldn't resist adding in a quip of his own. "Sounds like the bitch is talkin' about _you_ , boss man. You just gonna stand there an' take that?" he cackled and was only silenced when Jack shot him a look that would have had the power to wilt a fresh flower.

Ellie swallowed, ignoring everyone except for Jack. If she wanted to stay alive another day, Joel's phantom voice inside her head was right. She had to tell them whatever she thought these assholes wanted to hear or else…

_You're food for the Bloater. Brutus_ , she thought, and visibly cringed and crinkled her nose in disgust. "I'm the fastest I know. I'm lean, quick, quiet, I know how to outrun the infected and sneak into the stores and food places without them noticing me. At least I _did_ until today when _you_ assholes showed up and shot that Clicker," she growled. Jake chuckled at her response to Jack's question and Ellie frowned, though she dared not turn around to look the creep in the eyes. If she was going to do this, she needed to focus her sole attention on Jack, since the guy was the head of the pack, Ellie had a feeling he was the one who called all the shots around here, and was the determining factor in deciding if she stayed. And there was no point in trying to deny she needed a place to stay.

At least for a day or two. Just long enough for her to determine what the hell direction to take to start looking for Joel. "Without my weapons, which you guys _took_ ," Ellie began hesitantly, though she could not stop the anger from seeping into her voice as she curled her hands into a fist at her sides, her sharp nails digging into the skin of her palms. "I can't kill the infected. I can outrun them and avoid them as long as it takes, which works for now, but I hear that kind of method only works until it doesn't. And then, those creeps will kill me and that's the end of that."

Ellie cringed and watched as Jack smirked. "You don't say? It's only gonna work out till it doesn't, huh?" he repeated it slowly, letting the words almost roll off his tongue. She fell silent as Jack's gaze lingered on her small form, no doubt assessing her words and trying to gauge for himself if he thought Ellie was lying to him.

Jack furrowed his brows into a frown. The girl they'd swiped off the sidewalk back near the city's outer limits was really fucking small. She wasn't lying about that, and, how could she? But then again, size was no guarantee of power. Hell, look at his own son. Sam might be a tiny shrimp, but get him angry enough, kid packed a hell of a punch. He pursed his lips into a thin line and thought about it. Now that he was actively considering the kid's words, Jack and his crew could probably make use of this girl after all when it came to making trades with other groups. It was always a risk meeting up with suppliers no matter who they were or where the rendezvous point was.

There was always the likely probability of the other person killing Jack or whomever he sent in his stead to make the deal go down that they would kill them and just take the supplies and bolt. But if he sent the girl on some of them…well, they wouldn't _really_ shoot a fucking fourteen-year-old girl, now would they? Jack felt himself smile.

Ellie swallowed nervously as Jack looked her up and down. She could feel the sweat drench her skin, the throbbing of her own eyes behind her lids, and the audible thumping of her heart against its cage. Her fingers remained curled into tight fists. She couldn't quite hear her rapid breathing, but she could feel the air flooding in and out of her lungs as she forced her body to try to relax and remain calm. If she panicked, that was no good.

Hesitantly, she rose her head and meet the group's gaze, at her captor who had taken her alive. Fear churned her stomach into intense cramps, monetarily knocking aside all thoughts of Joel, pushing them to the back of her mind.

The fear she felt at her current situation overwhelmed her body, making it feel even more drastically exhausted, and suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to find a quiet place to lay down and sleep. However, most of all, the fear Ellie felt was making her calm and that was what fucking scared the most, and she wasn't even aware she'd drawn in a sharp, shaking breath and held it, until Jack's stoic face relaxed into a smile that wasn't quite genuine.

"I think we can find a use for you after all, kid," he grinned, flashing her that deceitfully charming grin again.

Ellie swallowed, feeling her false smile mold onto her face, pasted on as she mutely nodded her head, too afraid to speak. She winced as Jack clapped a hand on her shoulder and steered her back around, so that she was face-to-face with the chained up Bloater. She swallowed nervously, though she was determined not to make a single noise.

"You're gonna be our new runner, Ellie," Jack announced, raising his voice so the other guys could hear. "We got a few ground rules here to follow. Since you're gonna be stayin' with us now, but they ain't too hard to follow. Just do what me an' any of the other boys here tell you to do, an' we'll all get along like one big happy family, an' Brutus here isn't gonna be forced to chew on your little fragile bones. Deal?" he growled, his grip on her shoulder tightening.

Ellie winced, but nodded, cringing as Jack relaxed into a smile and smirked at her obvious growing discomfort.

"Great!" he grinned, turning towards the guys, and motioning with a wave of his arm for some of them to bring their haul inside the warehouse. "I knew you was a smart girl right from the start. You play along an' no one'll get hurt."

Ellie swallowed nervously, beads of sweat forming on her brow as the guy's grip on her shoulder tightened, and she allowed herself to be steered towards the direction of the main front entrance of these peoples' camps.

The warehouse. Ellie felt like her stomach was full of bricks, like lead was coursing through her mind instead of blood, as she tried to ignore the kind of painful grip that Jack had on her right shoulder blade as she wondered just what the fuck she had allowed herself to get into now. _Joel_ , she thought desperately, risking one last glance over her shoulder at the enormous Bloater tethered to its chains on the pole before the door slammed shut in her face.

_Wherever you are, I hope that you're safe and not fucking dead, and I hope you fucking find me…I need you._


	4. Your New Digs

**CHAPTER FOUR**

Ellie found herself at a loss for words as she allowed Sam and Jack to lead her through the upper level of the warehouse towards her so-called ‘bedroom.’ Little more than an oversized storage closet from the looks of things.

“You want like a water or something? We got sodas downstairs, I can have one of the boys bring you one with a little bit of food if you’re hungry. You gotta be starvin’, you must only weigh what, like eighty or ninety pounds?” Jack offered politely, and Ellie clenched her jaw shut and silently seethed, though she shook her head now. Sam noticed and furrowed his brows into a frown as he walked close beside Ellie, and it didn’t escape her attention that every once in a while, the kid would shoot her an interested glance out of the corner of his eyes. She scoffed a little at that. Ellie shook her head no, and almost the minute she did so, the kid opened his mouth to rebuff the rejection.

“I’ll bring you one in a little while. You’re probably thirsty. You like Coke or Dr. Pepper or something? We got a lotta options. Food storage is down below. I think we got enough to be all right for another month or so, but we’re always out making runs, and we’re glad to have you on the team. We need somebody that’s fast on her feet and can get in and outta places undetected. I’d say just that fact alone earns you some food and a well-deserved soda,” he said, and Ellie felt her head swivel to the left as she regarded the kid with an incredulous look in her eyes.

There was not a chance in hell that she would accept _anything_ from these people. She didn’t care if they had running electricity that was powered by a generator, cold and hot food and drinks, a warm shower, no way. What if they drugged her drink or poisoned whatever food they brought her? And she felt really awkward about it too, no less. They’d kidnapped her. Why would they even think she would consider trusting them after they’d taken her against her will and brought her here, to God only knew where, and she didn’t know what they really wanted with her. Jack could spout his bullshit about using her for supply runs and talk himself until he was blue in the face from lack of oxygen, but that wouldn’t make Ellie believe his lies. She frowned, though Jack ignored the dark look she shot him and continued walking, leading the pair of them down the hallway. “As I’m sure you figured it out already, I’m the leader. Our group calls themselves the Liberators. Dumb fuckin’ name if you ask me. Terry was the one who came up with it, not me,” he growled darkly, though the shift in Jack’s voice told Ellie that he thought it was hilarious. “My son, Sam, can help you with anything you need. He’ll be the one showin’ you the ropes, how we do things around here,” he added, and Ellie felt her face blanch as she looked towards the kid close to her age.

The son and father didn’t really look that much alike, except now that she’d been alerted to the family resemblance, she guessed she could kind of see how they were related. Similar, slender hooked noses, both of which had looked like they’d had them broken at one point or another. She wondered inappropriately for a moment what the fuck this father-son asshole team had done to piss off the wrong person, or if it had been even a person at all that had busted both their noses. She wished she could decline the offer of food and drink, but Ellie could tell Sam wasn’t going to let her say no, and she felt her shoulders slump in defeat as she gave a mute not, telling him yes.

What was even _worse_ , Ellie thought, was how much she was trying to hide the fact from herself just how hungry she really was. Almost at that exact moment, her stomach growled and snarled and from it came the not-so-subtle undertone of pain, reminding Ellie that the only thing she’d had to eat today was a mostly bruised red apple and a pre-packaged container of those little cracker sticks and cheese dipping sauce. She was fucking famished, honestly.

The pain came in waves and it seemed as though her stomach was slowly digesting itself. She clutched at, practically clawing at it to try to silence the damn noise but to no avail. It cried even louder, earning poor Ellie a bemused little smirk from Jack, and a more sympathetic look from his son, Sam. Now they knew she was hungry.

“Thought so,” smirked Sam, shooting her this weird little lopsided half grin that she wasn’t sure what to make of.

She didn’t want to accept a goddamn thing from these creeps. Ellie didn’t want to feel like she owed them anything, when the harsh reality of the fact that they didn’t seem to quite get was that these guys owed _her_.

They were the ones who’d basically abducted her from the goddamned sidewalk in the middle of the city and had taken her in the complete opposite direction of where she’d intended to start searching for Joel. She was not at fault here. Ellie didn’t want to live with these assholes! She wanted to go back in the direction she’d come from and be with Joel and continue on the path to Salt Lake City. Marlene was waiting for them, and if Ellie had to guess, she wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a few Firefly scouts had been sent out at sort of a search party if they didn’t make it there by the appointed date. Ellie didn’t want to be with anyone else but with Joel. While they hadn’t exactly gotten off on the right foot, he was admittedly the closest thing she had to a father figure in this fucked up world.

She didn’t think that Joel necessarily loved her, and she didn’t love him either. After all, they still didn’t really know each other that well, but…he knew her perhaps better than anyone else they’d met in their travels along the way. Joel wasn’t exactly a warm and caring guy, not one of those tough-looking types on the outside and a teddy bear on the inside. Nope. That definitely wasn’t Joel, but at least Ellie could always depend on Joel to keep his word. She’d been with the guy in cars, in the same room together, and he never did anything perverted or mean.

_Not like…not like David tried to do_ , her conscience offered unhelpfully, and she could taste the bile coating the back of her throat as just the thought of the cannibal’s very name caused her stomach to give a painful little lurch.

Her nightmares the last few weeks were always the same. Feeling more like night terrors, because it felt like every night when Ellie tried to go to sleep, that she’d die from the pain in her brain. She was always desperately trying to wake up, screaming for Joel or anybody decent to help her, yet nobody in her dreams would come for her.

She would escape from David on her hands and knees, practically clawing her way towards the exit. It was always the same. Paralyzed, cold, unable to move. David would come closer with his machete, making sweeping movements and hacking gestures as she desperately tried to scoot out of the way, though seeing no other way out.

The fucking cannibal would come closer to Ellie with his knife, and then further away as she ducked behind a desk or something, and then closer again. And no matter which path she took, it always came back to face the man himself front and center, his machete raised and ready to hack her body to pieces. There was only one way out.

That was usually around the time she woke up covered in a cold sweat and beads of sweat on her brow and always feeling like she was going to puke, and she would always be relieved that it was just another nightmare.

But unlike everyone else Ellie knew, when she would wake up, she would have the unfortunate reality of remembering that her nightmare was both real and worse than the fragmented reenactment her brain offered her.

Instead of relief upon waking, she would get the trauma fresh and raw, as though her narrow brush with death with David and his fucking sick psychotic group of cannibals had happened only yesterday instead of a few weeks ago. Ellie got to see David screaming and ranting and hurling insults at her as he raised the machete high over his head, prepared to deliver the incapacitating blow to her infected arm or her head. And no matter how often the nightmare came to her, she could never quite shake the realness of it all. She blinked back the unpleasant memory as she realized that Jack was saying something to her. “Huh?” she stammered, the heat creeping to her cheeks rapidly.

Jack rolled his eyes. “I was sayin, Ellie, we got some rules here, but they’re pretty easy to follow. Strictly enforced, as I’m sure you can guess, but then what kinda fuckin’ leader would I be if I just let the rest of my crew run wild? You gotta follow the house rules, shall we say, but I’m also not a fuckin’ pushover about it. Long as you pull your weight an’ play nicely with the others, I think we’re all gonna get along just fuckin’ fine, kid. Easy stuff.”

“Like what?” Ellie furrowed her brows into a frown. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Be respectful of our rules,” stated Jack, lacing his fingers together as he opened the door. “This’ll be your room. Everybody gets their own space. It ain’t much but it’s better’n sleepin’ out in the open, vulnerable and exposed.”

Ellie furrowed her brows into a frown. At first glance, she thought it had been a cupboard, like the kind Harry Potter had been forced to stay in when the wizard lived with the Dursleys, but instead on the inside was a bedroom.

It had clearly belonged to a child, once, and a loved one at that, though how a company could allow a family to live here was beyond Ellie, and then she mentally kicked herself for even thinking that. _Whoever lived here before these people found it had probably been living here for a long time after the world went to hell_ , she thought sadly.

There were so many posters of My Chemical Romance and some other bands that Ellie couldn’t identify up on the walls that she really wasn’t sure what color the paint was behind them. The double bed was not pushed up against a wall, but more central with an elaborate mahogany headboard. On the nightstand next to the bed was a worn but still good copy of _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_. Ellie could make use of that reading material later, making a mental note to stuff that book and any others she could find while staying here in her backpack to take with her. She _loved_ reading. Reading for young Ellie was like an escape from reality for her, which she needed.

Whenever she would pick up a book during quiet times and start reading, she would get so sucked into it that she would sometimes forget any of her surroundings and forget for that brief period of time that the world fucking sucked. Her imagination was free to take over and she was free to fantasize about whatever the hell she wanted to without worrying that people would judge her, without allowing her mind to become consumed by the thought that she very likely held the key to humanity’s cure, just by allowing the Fireflies to examine her scar. IF they made it to Salt Lake City, Utah, which she was unlikely to do unless she could find Joel and get the fuck out of her.

It was like she could create her own little world inside her mind and imagine what the characters of the story would look like and how they would act, and it made her think if she were in their shoes at that point in the story, what would she do. Ellie thought it was kind of crazy how much something as casual and simple as reading could leave such an impact on her. She blinked, tearing her gaze away from the clearly much-loved copy of Harry Potter and continued looking around the room, slinging her backpack off her shoulders and tossing it haphazardly on the bed. The bed itself had a duvet cover that looked like it was in need of a good washing, covered with a thick layer of pristine dust and some dust bunnies that made Ellie fight back a tickling sneeze, but a good shakeout before bed would have to do, since she didn’t know what all these people had in terms of laundry and how to wash clothes.

Not a footfall had disturbed this room in sometime. Ellie felt her jaw lock up and tighten and turned towards Jack and Sam, who were lingering in the bedroom’s doorway, waiting for her to tell the pair of them what she thought.

She plastered a fake smile on her face and hoped that it was genuine, forcing a nervous weak little laugh from her lips. “It’s…really great,” she managed to croak out hoarsely, sauntering over to the nightstand and picking up the copy of the third _Harry Potter_ book. “I never did finish this series,” Ellie mumbled, the pad of her fingertip tracing over the cover. It came away coated in dust and grime. She flinched and wiped her finger on her jeans. “Is it good?”

Sam piped up eagerly before his dad could intervene, though Jack shot his son an annoyed look, he made no comment, for which Ellie was grateful. Even if it was just for a fraction of a millisecond, she needed the distraction.

“Oh, yeah, you’re gonna love it,” he gushed, and if Ellie wasn’t mistaken, the kid sounded relieved to be talking about something other than the ‘house rules’ for a change. “Third and fourth ones are the best in the series, but the fifth and sixth books are where it gets _real_. The series grows up real fast. The seventh book in the series is gonna make you cry though. Not gonna lie, I bawled my eyes out when…well, guess I can’t tell you. Something tells me you wouldn’t appreciate any spoilers, Ellie,” Sam joked, and Ellie watched as a light pink blush crept onto his cheeks. He opened his mouth to say something else, but promptly closed his mouth as his dad jabbed him with the edge of his elbow in his ribcage. Sam winced and faltered backwards, clutching his right side in pain and fell silent.

“You’ll have time for a cozy little chit-chat _later_ ,” Jack growled, narrowing his eyes and glaring at his son before turning back towards Ellie, who frowned at the treatment of the kid who seemed like he was just trying to be nice to her, something she could respect and appreciate, but had no time to ponder it further as Jack spoke to Ellie again.

“So,” Jack began, his authoritative tone unmistakable. “Like I was sayin’, this is your own space. Your room. Mostly you gotta be respectful of this place. It’s our home, whether it seems like it or not. Though with all the boys we got runnin’ around, sometimes it feels like a goddamned frat party more than anything else,” he joked, smirking.

Ellie didn’t smile. She didn’t get it. Jack noticed and his smile faltered, and he coughed once to clear his throat. “Anyways,” he continued, in a more somber tone than before, “We’re all a family here, an’ we need to live like a family first, friends second. We can all be really good friends to you, Little El, but we can also be your enemy,” he growled, narrowing his eyes in a way that resembled a pit viper’s pupils. Ellie swallowed nervously and shook her head. “Good.” Jack nodded his head in approval at her agreement. “I didn’t think you’d wanna be enemies. Nobody wants to go a round with ol’ Brutus. Anybody that thought they could, they would fuckin’ lose and Brutus would be havin’ himself a tasty little snack,” he joked, rolling his eyes, ignoring Ellie’s paling face at the mention of that pet Bloater. “We got chores around here. Everybody’s gotta pitch in an’ help keep this place runnin’. Not too much though. It’s reasonable, what I ask of everyone here. And since you’re kinda on the small side, kid, no offense, I think Sam here can find somethin’ for you to do that you ain’t gonna absolutely hate. I consider that more than fair, but you do gotta help out ‘round this place. Obviously, you’re like fourteen, so no drugs or alcohol or sex.” He smirked towards his son Sam like it was some kind of private joke between the father and son duo.

Ellie frowned and stared back, her green eyes wide and round in shock, feeling her jaw practically drop to the floor in shock. Why the fuck would he even joke about something like that? It _wasn’t_ funny, not at all to her.

Jack noticed and commented. “But I don’t think I gotta worry ‘bout you, kiddo. You ain’t old enough for me to have to tell you that, are you?” he asked. Ellie continued staring at the group’s leader, at a loss for words. She wasn’t going to divulge a word about what David and his lackeys had tried to do to her, and she didn’t want to talk about it ever again if she could help it. Joel had pressed her for details, but even she couldn’t bring herself to talk about what had happened to him.

To her surprise, his son cleared his throat, and when she peeked over at Sam out of the corner of her eyes, she saw that his face was beet red, like a tomato. “Uh, Jack, I don’t think we gotta worry about any of that stuff with her. Ellie seems like a good kid with an even better head on her shoulders. I think we’ll be okay, but the others…”

His voice trailed off and his cute face contorted into a frown.

His dad noticed and soon his facial expressions matched the others. “Huh,” he grunted, folding his arms across his chest. “Guess you got a point there, son. Didn’t even occur to me that this one’s probably the first girl a lot of ‘em have talked to since the world went to shit. Well, whatever. You’re under my protection while you’re stayin’ with us, and given you’re underage, I ain’t gonna let anyone here touch you. You wanna be her little guard or some shit, fuckin’ go for it, but whatever you fuckin’ do, _don’t_ leave Jake alone with her. Just in case. I swear to God, that man’ll stick his dick in anything that has a hole in it. Fuckin’ disgusting. Fuckin’ hell, I still remember what happened the last time with the goddamned chicken and…well, never mind. It ain’t important. I don’t think he’d try that kinda shit with this one, she’s way too goddamn young,” he grumbled, and he either ignored or completely missed the color draining from Ellie’s face, or the terrified sheen in her eyes. “Hope so.” Jack shrugged his shoulders and glanced to Ellie, who’d barely said more than a few sentences to him ever since they’d brought her here. “You can talk to me, kid. You know that, right? I ain’t gonna bite.” Jack frowned as he stared down at Ellie in confusion.

Shrugging her shoulders in response, Ellie looked back. Oh, she could talk to these assholes all right. She just didn’t want to. What the fuck would they even talk about? They’d kidnapped her and taken her stuff. The only thing she had to say to these guys was a whole bunch of cuss words and demand they drop her off somewhere.

As Ellie lifted her chin to meet the leader’s gaze, she couldn’t help but feel an insurmountable panic well deep within the confines of her chest. Maybe she should make herself say something, just to show the asshole she’d been paying attention. Even Ellie knew she couldn’t stay quiet forever. There was a small part of her that wanted to talk, opening up to someone nice, like Sam was slowly but surely proving himself to be, letting other people be nice to her, meant that while it was easier for her to make connections, also opened up the door to letting people hurt her.

“I think you’re really gonna like it here. The other guys, Terry and Vic and Levi. They been with me about a year and a half, ever since Sam and I found this place pretty much abandoned and decided to set up base camp here.”

“Oh.” She breathed, not really sure what was appropriate to say in this situation. She jumped as Jack smiled.

“So, do you talk, after all.” He snorted, clapping a hand on Ellie’s shoulder, and giving it a firm but kind of gentle squeeze. Ellie bit the inside of her cheek and resisted the urge to slap the creep’s hand away. “Good. Was startin’ to think you’d lost your voice for good or somethin’ back there, with the way you were carryin’ on, screamin’ and hollerin’ at us back there with ole Brutus,” he joked, though his grin faltered. “Sam’ll bring up somethin’ for you in a bit. I’ll let you uh…get settled and chill out for a bit or whatever you wanna do. Just don’t wander off too far.”

Ellie frowned and folded her arms across her chest, though she gave a curt nod, signaling she understood. “I’ll do whatever you jerks want. Run into shops and get stuff for you guys. I’m good at it. I’ll do whatever you want, but…” She jerked her arm away and wrenched herself out of Jack’s ironclad grip. “Tell your boys hands _off_ ,” she snapped through clenched teeth and clutched herself as it all of a sudden felt really fucking cold in her bedroom.

Jack frowned as he took a step back and raised his hands in self-defense. “Whoa, kid! I think you got the wrong fuckin’ idea. I ain’t gonna do no weird gross shit to you, an’ I’ll see it to it my boys don’t lay a finger on you. We’re not a buncha creepy kiddie rapist types if that’s what you’re askin’, girl. Did you really think we’d fuckin’ do that to you?”

Ellie shrunk down into her shirt as much as she could for warmth. “I—I don’t know,” she confessed, biting the inside of her cheek. After running into David’s group and discovered they tortured and killed people and then ate them in order to stay alive, the teenager kind of figured anything was fucking possible, really. “Maybe. Probably.”

Jack rolled his eyes and turned towards Sam. “I’m outta here, kiddos. Sam, get the girl whatever she fuckin’ needs. Bring her up some food in a little while. You want an extra blanket or somethin’, all you gotta do is ask.”

Ellie furrowed her brows into a frown and stared after the Liberator’s leader as he shoved his hands in his jeans pockets and strolled almost leisurely down the hallway and back downstairs, whistling a low haunting tune to himself. She scoffed and rolled her eyes in response. “He’s a real fucking charmer, isn’t he?” she snapped angrily.

Sam bit his tongue and hesitated, not really sure what to say. Finally, he decided to tell the kid the truth.

“He wasn’t always like this, you know. Well. Yeah,” he admitted, correcting himself. “He was always kind of a jackass, but he had a little good in him before… _this_ ,” Sam growled darkly. “And then when everything went to hell…the worst parts of him came out. I don’t always agree with his choices, but he’s my dad an’ I don’t get a say.”

“Yes, you do.” Ellie stared, hardly daring to believe the words that were coming out of this guy’s mouth. “He’s your _dad_. You’re his _kid_ ,” she emphasized, staring at Sam with wide, doe-like green eyes that he wasn’t quite sure what to make of, she could tell by his facial expression that nobody had really talked to him like this before, ever.

“It’s not that simple,” Sam protested, though a look of doubt crossed his feature and he reached up a hand to scratch at an itch sheepishly in his blond hair. “You’ve seen the kind of temper my dad has. A—and the Bloater…”

Sam’s voice trailed off and cracked, breaking on the last word and that was more than enough for Ellie to know everything about the Liberator’s son that she needed to know. That he wasn’t like all of the other guys, that maybe…just maybe he could help plan an escape from this shithole, and maybe one day, even call him a friend.

“How the fuck did he catch it without it killing him?” Ellie breathed, her curiosity overtaking her anger for a brief second as she wandered over to the window and glanced outside at the world two stories below her new digs.

Sam shrugged, looking bothered, his eyes darting to the left and the right. “I dunno, honestly. I was out on a supply run with some of the other guys in our group at the time. They’re…gone now,” and just the pause in his voice for Ellie was way more than enough for the girl to figure that these so-called guys who were groupies at that point in time had probably done something to piss Jack off, and as a result, became the first few displays for Brutus the Bloater down there, showing the rest of the world what happened to you if you dared to cross a guy like Jack.

Ellie sighed, rubbing her temples wearily. She was getting one hell of a fucking headache and she just wanted some food and a nap. “Lemme guess. He had it already chained and tied up by the time you and the guys got back.”

“Yup.” Sam nodded, folding his arms across his chest as he rested his back against the doorframe, folding one leg over the other. “I dunno how he did it. My dad might not look it or sound like it by the way he walks and talks and all that stupid shit, but he’s smart. Resourceful. He did what he had to do. He figured it out. And that’s what you’re gonna have to be. Resourceful, and you’re gonna have to figure things out around here if you want any hope of staying alive here.” He let out a tired sigh and lifted his chin to meet Ellie’s gaze. “Look, Ellie. You’re smart. I know you are. We aren’t gonna hurt you, or at least my dad and I won’t. Jake and Terry, I’ve never really liked, and I’ll do what I can to keep ‘em off your back. I know the types of guys my dad tends to pick to join us are tough sons of bitches and are assholes. But not me. I like you. I wanna help you out and I don’t want to see you become food for that Bloater. I’ll do what I can to help you out here. Hell, I don’t like this anymore than you do. You think I _like_ the kidnapping?” he growled angrily, running a hand through his cropped blond hair in anguish, not looking at Ellie, seemingly ashamed of the life his father had dragged him into. “Look. You got a good thing going here. Potentially. I know you wanna find your dad, and I can try to help you get outta here, b—but we need time. Now isn’t the time. We gotta wait for the right time and place. You told my dad you’re good at supply runs, so you’ll help him out with that, like he said. We make trades with other nearby groups too. I’m gonna do what I can to help keep you alive till I can find a good time to help you make a break for it so you can go an’ find your dad. Joel or whatever his name is. We gave you a place to sleep, food, water, clothes. All that good shit, but you’re gonna kinda be my dad’s errand girl, and it might be the only way you stay alive. Got it?”

Ellie swallowed and nodded, biting her bottom lip, and sticking it out in a slight pout. “‘Kay,” she whispered in a soft voice. “And you and the other guys aren’t gonna hurt me?”

Sam frowned and kept his arms folded across his chest. “No way. Why the fuck would I? We’re giving you a place to stay, food to eat, a certain amount of protection that’s actually good for something in this day and age. My dad’s the type of guy who never does anything for free. He saved your life from that Clicker and now you owe him.” Sam couldn’t help but wonder just what the fuck had happened to this kid. She seemed so skittish and terrified. She must have had one hell of a run in with a particularly nasty group or something a while back, maybe.

Ellie didn’t totally agree with Sam’s claims, and if anything, she could make the argument that these assholes owed _her_. A lot. She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose with her thumb and her forefinger. “You got a deal.”

Sam nodded, pleased with her answer. “Good.” A beat. A pause. “You want some food or something?” he added, his gaze drifting downward as he noticed Ellie clutch onto her stomach as a loud grumble from it filled the bedroom. He chuckled and shook his head. “I think we got some of the Double Stuf Oreos you swiped from that store downstairs. Me an’ the other guys don’t really like junk food all that much, so whatever you got in that pack we ain’t gonna touch. I’ll be sure to put it somewhere safe where the other guys can’t get to it if you want. You want me to bring you up a plate of cookies?” he asked, and there was no mistaking the note of hope in his voice.

Ellie could tell the guy close to her age just wanted to help her out, and the only way she was going to get said help was if she stopped being kind of a bitch to Sam and started to treat him with respect. If Joel were here, he’d tell me the same thing, she thought sadly, and gave a quiet, shy little nod, but stopped herself as Sam turned and made to move away. “Wait!” she called out; a hand outstretched in front of her as though she thought that could prevent Sam from leaving. He froze, lingering in the doorway and turned around slowly, an uncertain look on his handsome face.

“Yeah?” he asked uncertainly. Sam inhaled a sharp breath as he lifted his chin and brushed a lock of blond bang out of his eyes, and he was honestly surprised to see the little fourteen-year-old kid offering him a shy smile.

When she spoke to Sam, her voice was hopeful. “About those cookies…you got any milk to go with those?”


	5. Take My Hand

**CHAPTER FIVE**

This new world had teeth, and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Joel found that out the hard way when he'd gone out on a scouting mission for food shortly after tracking down Ellie's whereabouts and finding those disgusting cannibals and as a result of his stupidity and not minding his step, had tripped over a goddamned tree root and had fallen pretty much head first down a steep ravine, that he was lucky he hadn't fucking broken his neck or any other bone during the fall.

The kid had insisted on coming with him and had practically begged the older man not to go out alone, not when he was still healing, but he hadn't listened. Well, Joel was starting to wish he'd fucking listened to Ellie now, because the girl was right, as much as he hated to admit it to himself. That foul mouthed pain in his ass had been right. She should have gone with him, they should have stuck to the plan and stuck together, and because he hadn't listened, he was the one ultimately paying the price, and for all he knew, Ellie had either been captured by another group or was dead.

The pain from his fucking wounds had an unpleasant warmth to it, feeling like it was eating away at the inside of poor Joel's stomach. There was nausea too. Just enough for Joel to make him reach out a shaking hand and grasp onto anything he could for support. In this case it was a boulder or a tree limb. The grizzled man in his early forties had often prided himself in times past on his ability to ignore pain and just rock on regardless, pressing forward, but that just wasn't possible right now for the man. It owned him, dominated every thought, controlled Joel's every action, this stupid sepsis.

Pain seared through his abdomen better than a branding iron for cattle, his fractured mind pretty much conceding to the torment at this point, unable to bring a thought to completion. Without even meaning to, Joel felt his body slump against the bough of an old oak tree and curled into something almost like a fetal position, something primeval and all the while the pain from his side where he'd been impaled burned and radiated like fire.

The pain wasn't sharp, like a needlepoint or a knife, all of which Joel was pretty well familiar with, but instead, it burned his innards better than scaling hot water. Everything felt scolded and move or not, not that he could, Joel was in way more pain than he ever could have imagined was possible. A bullet right between his eyes would be a fucking mercy right now, but an increase in these weird hallucinations he'd been having for the last couple of days were the best he could hope for.

It felt like it was increasing in fucking waves, these pulsating fiery bursts of pain that flared up in his stab wounds. Small lulls giving false hope of an end. Each peak robbed Joel's futile attempts to speak, sending him crashing back to the forest floor any time he tried to find something with which to right himself. He had to find Ellie, but it felt like his fucking blood in his veins had become acid, intent on destroying him from the inside out. All he could do in this case was sit and writhe, the occasional little moan reverberating off the thickets of trees and heavy brush that surrounded him down here.

Joel's mind screamed at him in agony, begging for relief as he barely twitched his leg and the pain drove up his spine and through his back. Every thought he just had about trying to come up with another way to get out of here that would undoubtedly fail just became confused as the burning pain licked up his back like scorching fire. The only thoughts Joel had was like knife through butter.

He shed a tear at his own suffering, and he wasn't a man who cried. Joel curled up in a ball of self-loathing and pain, wishing his goddamned suffering and the world would just fucking end this already. Anything but to endure this sea of endless currents of pain. Some strong, some weak, but the waves always crashed over him in a constant state of motion, ebbs, and flows, just like the ocean.

Joel had been trapped down here for the better part of a week, at least. Maybe more, though he had no way of knowing for sure just how much time had passed because his watch was broken.

A surge of pain—a different kind of pain this time—welled deep within the pit of his chest as he glanced at his broken watch. A gift from Sarah for his birthday right before she…right before she…

Joel clenched his jaw tightly and ground his teeth in anger, squeezing his eyes shut as visions of his daughter danced in the forefront of his mind. No. He wasn't going to go there. Not right now.

_You gotta find Ellie and get her the fuck out of here. Make your way to Salt Lake, hand her over to the Fireflies, and that's that_ , his conscience scolded him internally, chastising him for being weak.

Though there was a part of him that wanted to think of his daughter. Of Sarah. He'd never admit this to anyone, and he would never know if she was really there, like she was right now, standing over her daddy and watching Joel take in a shaking exhaled breath that sounded kind of rattling within the confines of his chest, a worried expression that twisted her little face into a grimace, or if it was the result of maybe a poisonous berry or something he'd accidentally eaten a few days earlier.

He grunted in response as 'Sarah' said something inaudible, mumbling it underneath her breath. Joel turned his head sharply away, still keeping his eyes clenched shut. The problem with his hallucinations was their unpredictably. His mind, however, was far more creative than that.

His 'daughter' could show up at any time, and a few hours after he'd first fallen down this fucking ravine, she'd shown up, and Joel had thought that he'd died and gone to some weird heaven.

If you were one to believe in that kind of thing, which, given the cruel way in which God, if there was a God, had allowed his daughter's life to be so cruelly cut short, and now the rest of the world was in fucking ruins, he wasn't so sure of if he believed in a higher power or not, but what he did know was this: Sarah had not left his side once, though during these visions, she never talked much.

At first, Sarah only came to him in dreams after _it_ had happened. His brother Tommy had shot the asshole of a soldier that had accidentally gunned down Sarah when they'd driven up to the barricade and had fucking fallen short of getting down on their knees and _begging_ to be let through the barrier, though it did not nothing to ease the void in his heart. Joel blinked, thinking that Sarah was no more than a distortion of the light, a tiny little twelve-year-old girl cut out of colors that weren't quite right. Where she moved, the things behind her appeared bowed, as if he were looking at his deceased daughter through one of those mild fish-eye lenses. Then, as quickly as Sarah came, she left Joel alone. Without so much as leaving a foot impression in the winter mud. Joel decided he would never know if it was the goddamned cold which was affecting his mind, or his wound sepsis, or if Sarah was honest-to-god truly there by his side somehow. Her form re-appeared and shimmered and wave, but then again, it kind of felt like everything had been doing that that Joel's hazy, blurry gaze laid eyes upon, with every lick of moisture in the ground being sent skyward for it to freeze into snow.

Sarah walked like she was painted onto the pristine white horizon with a fine brush, the artist constantly touching up and making alterations. Joel inhaled a sharp breath of frigid cold air that quite literally pained his lungs as his twelve-year-old daughter turned to stare at her father. Her eyes met his, but un-seeingly, like Joel was nothing more than a shadow himself, a trick of Sarah's own eyes.

His vision was dazzled by the blinding white light of the early morning December sun peeking down, sending shafts of light through the thick canopy of the trees. Despite the fact that Sarah must have trekked through the bush to get to that spot where she was standing and silently pointing, there was not a single speck of dirt on her clothes. His baby girl stood barefooted in the early morning sun, almost translucent. Then she pointed across the river to the far bank. Joel followed her gesture and there hidden amongst the weeds was an old run-down boat. Looked like a kayak from this distance.

"Thank God. You did it, baby girl. I—I'm so proud of you. I'll—I'll be seein' you _real_ soon, I promise, but there's somethin' I gotta take care of first. I'm helpin' this girl out, her name's Ellie. I think…I think you woulda like her. I think the two you woulda become good friends if you'd…if you'd…" he breathed, turning to smile at his daughter but she had already gone. Sarah had pointed and shown him the way out of here. There was no trace that another person had ever been here. Joel, despite him already knowing that his mind was playing tricks on him in his semi-conscious state and wild deliriousness, rushed towards the spot where Sarah had stood only moments before, and not even the grass was pressed down. "Fuck," he growled through gritted teeth, balling his hands into a fist. "Don't go. Don't leave me like this, baby girl…" He whispered his last sentence, his voice cracking and faltering as he stared at the spot where his baby girl had stood only moments before, and then Joel glanced down at his broken watch and felt a surge of insurmountable anger course through his veins and he resisted the urge to pull the goddamned thing off of his wrist and throw it across the fucking river. He didn't want the damn watch. He wanted Sarah back. "I want you back, baby girl," he whispered, his voice cracking and wavering. "I want you back. I want you back," he whispered through gritted teeth, blinking back salty, grimy tears that were threatening to spill out over the corner of his eyes. He'd fucking failed the only person in life that had ever mattered to him.

In that space in Joel's heart, what little was left of it since Sarah's passing, that would have been filled with love and affection, at his foundations, keeping the good parts of his personality afloat, there was a horrible dark void that nothing and no one could penetrate. A wall around his heart that he built. There were days, especially recently ever since Ellie came into his life, that Joel purposely filled with chaos and noise, just to keep Sarah's ghost at bay. But then there were other times that he called for her, mostly in his nightmares, too fucking terrified to watch her blood staining his palms in his dreams, watching her get gunned down over and over again by the soldier who he would have killed in a blind rage if Tommy had shot the man first point blank. Joel hated that he couldn't let go of it.

To feel Sarah's presence and only see an empty room, to hear her voice and turn around to say something to his daughter, only to reach out and feel nothing but the cold air, broke his heart into two all over again. Yet, he wanted, no, needed, Sarah to fucking stay with him, because without her, he felt lost. He retreated into the chaos that he created for himself because Joel's love for his daughter was so strong it started to break him in ways that he knew were difficult to mend, and even more difficult to explain to someone else. _Someone like Ellie?_ His conscience offered, rather unhelpfully too. He swatted away the dark swirling thoughts in his head with an angry wave of his right hand.

So, here he sat, between both concepts, chaos, and love. Both of them hurt Joel, and both of them helped Joel. The difference is, Joel thought he could be happy with just Sarah's love and forgiveness, but the chaos on its own? That would kill him. Joel wanted nothing more than to find the right road back to Sarah, the one that lead him back to her and prayed that the door to their home would still be open for him, though she'd been dead now for several years. Exhaling a shaking breath through clenched teeth, Joel braced himself on the ground of the freezing forest floor. Fuck, it was so cold…

He couldn't really risk building a fire out here in the open, lest the light and the noise of rustling around trying to gather tinder for the firepit would alert either people with ill intentions towards his location, or worse. The Infected. And he was almost out of bullets. He'd killed a Clicker the other day with his shotgun, and as a result, he was down to only three shells, and he had to make them count. Joel exhaled slowly through his nose, trying in vain to get up, but quickly realized just how fucking futile it was when he had to bite down hard on his bottom lip to keep from screaming.

Sharp pains lanced through his wound side, and colorful spots flashed in front of his eyes. It felt like his whole body had been beaten with a baseball bat and every movement he tried to make, even just a twitch of his foot caused a completely different muscle or bone in his broken, beaten body to ache.

Regardless, Joel knew he needed to get out of this goddamned ravine…away from the Infected.

_And back to Ellie_ , his conscience guided. _You made the girl a promise that you'd get her there_.

Joel let out an agonized groan as he allowed himself to slump back against the bough of the withered old oak tree under which he had taken refuge. Closing his eyes and trying his damned hardest to ignore the rapidly swelling flares of fiery pain that pulsated from his wound site, instead, he tried to focus on feeling the cold winter's chilly air and the feel of the cold, smooth ground beneath him. Joel was just so fucking tired. His legs and feet ached from previously wandering the length of the stupid ravine, trying to assess the way out, and when he'd glanced over toward that spot where Sarah had pointed, the boat that had been hiding in the reeds was gone. "Just fucking perfect…"

Now the only way out of this godforsaken ravine was up. To climb. Joel stifled a groan, his knuckles white as he balled his hand into a fist, using the bough of the tree as a support system as he shakily rose to his feet. Before, back when the world had been normal, he'd underestimated the utter blackness of night in the forest. Stepping into the forest robbed you of one sense and heightened the others. It was disorientating to be almost blinded but given the ears of a wolf. Even the soft susurration of the branches felt heavy in his ears. Joel's sense of smell was sensitized, the loam in the earth and the decomposing leaves made the atmosphere close and thick. The blackness nurtured a sense of claustrophobia inside you even though the woodland stretched unbroken for miles. The narrow path, which was made uneven by the knotted roots that crossed it, branched at intervals. There was no map for Joel to follow, but even if there was the perpetual dark would prevent him from using the bloody thing, so he was going to have to grit his teeth, and power through the pain.

Joel gritted his teeth and locked his jaw as he shakily rose to his feet again and doubled over, clutching at his side. He felt something moist and sticky and warm drip through his fingers. Blood.

"Fuck," he growled angrily. "Need…to…get up…there," he gasped hoarsely. "Find…Ellie…"

It was truly amazing to Joel how every time he felt this horrible pain, he could deal with the physical stuff all day long. Nope. It was the emotional pain at seeing Sarah, hallucination or not, that was killing him slowly, and didn't hurt him in the same way that a simple cut or stab wound would.

It was just this heavy, aching feeling. Joel's head felt like it was spinning, and it was as if his tongue was too big for his mouth. He felt the need to wipe away non-existent tears that he almost wanted them to form as Sarah's shimmering and wavering form appeared at the very top of the ravine's ledge but couldn't. He blinked once or twice, clenching his eyes shut and when he flung them open again, there she was. Patiently waiting for him, with her hand outstretched. He thought it was kind of amazing how every time he felt that aching pain at losing his precious baby girl, the only explanation he could sum up, was how Joel caused that pain on himself. If he'd moved out of the way quicker…

And anytime his mind started him down on this particular line of thinking, all that did, though, was bring his heart even more pain. Every ounce of Joel wished he had the fucking nerve to swing his body off the top of a building. To walk deep into the depths of the ocean and stay down underwater.

To take a gun and place the cold metal down his throat, pulling the trigger, shooting away the pain. But now…he had something new to fight for, a reason to keep on livin', as he liked to tell Ellie.

And it was because of the kid that he was struggling his way up the ravine, his ribcage and thigh screaming for relief. He had made her a promise and he aimed to keep it. To stick by her side.

Get her to the Fireflies, work on a cure, and then maybe they'd head on back to Tommy's settlement, and hopefully live a quiet life. Joel groaned as another spams of pain rippled through his body in waves, and he almost faltered and lost his grip on the boulder he was clinging to in an effort to scale the thick ravine. The pain in his ribcage throbbed and swelled, but he was going to fucking make it. "I—I gotta," he panted, feeling beads of sweat form on his brow. Even out here in frigid cold temperatures as the sun had long set below the horizon, Joel was radiating heat like a brick right out of the oven. He'd eaten nothing over the last couple of weeks save for the provisions he'd packed and the berries in the woods. He'd managed to shoot and skin some squirrels and rabbits and cooked the meat up over a fire, but after an Infected had been drawn towards the noise of the fire crackling, he'd nixed the idea of cooking anything again until he could get out of those damned fucking woods.

Joel turned his head to the side and coughed, honestly kind of surprised that if someone or something else happened to be out here with him, that they couldn't hear his coughing and wheezing spell echoing through the dark woods. It was a barking cough that carried well through the trees' canopy and the still late winter air. He let out a groan as he reached the top of the ravine and almost slipped again against a wet rock from the fallen snow. His whole body fucking ached, his cheeks burning with the flush of fever that was only going to get worse if he couldn't get back to the cabin they'd shacked up in nearby once he made it to the top and get some antibiotic disinfectant on it.

The stuff stung like a motherfucking bitch and sure packed one hell of a punch, but it got the job done. He would have called out for help as another shooting pain pulsated up his entire right side, but there was no strength left in his voice, just a whisper, and he only spoke one name. "Ellie…"

His breath quivered in short, quick gasps every time he inhaled, his lungs having no choice but to painfully and rigidly take in the cold winter air around him as the former hunter struggled to pull himself over the top of the ravine's edge. Joel couldn't seem to stop his incessant shaking, either.

Sometimes it was kind of rough, other times Joel thought he could manage it, but every time he'd get close to closing his eyes to sleep it off, a new spell of violent shaking would force the former hunter awake. "I'll get better. I'll get better," he repeated to himself, heaving as he finally hauled himself over the edge, collapsing onto the frozen forest ground, laying on his back and staring numbly up at the dozens of dead trees that surrounded him. He feebly rubbed away at his arms in a sickly attempt to cease the unsettling chill that continued to run down his spine and made Joel's skin crawl.

Joel let out a pained moan that was more like a whimper as he turned his head, spitting out a mouthful of snow and dirt as he did so.

At the tree line, Sarah appeared and vanished like a coin in a magic trick. There one moment, gone the next. She wasn't ghostly, not transparent in any way or frightening like you would think a ghost to be. She wasn't like the spooks of the old scary movies Sarah used to love to watch with Joel before she died. Joel couldn't help himself as a half-choked sob, this one willfully set free from its confines, escaped his lips as his twelve-year-old daughter reached out a hand to her father. "Daddy," she urged, her little voice sounding tiny and scared, desperate. "You gotta take my hand, Daddy. You can't stay here. Need to leave. Danger. In danger. That girl needs your help, Daddy. C'mon. Let's move it."

Joel grunted and clenched his eyes shut, blinking away the briny, salty tears that threatened to pour down his cheeks in heavy tracts if he couldn't get a handle on his emotions. "I can…I can do this…"

Joel felt his eyes flung open as a horrible rasping noise reached his eardrums, and he drew in another sharp breath of cold air that pained his lungs as he stared at his daughter's corpse in front of him. Her pajama shirt she'd worn on the night she died was stained with fresh, crimson blood, her dirty blonde short hair was matted and tangled with her own blood, and now she had one ear missing and it looked like her lip had been bitten off. Joel let out a cry of anguish and wanted to turn his head away to avoid looking at Sarah any longer than he had to, but he was unable to tear his gaze away.

He winced as she made a horrible gurgling noise from the back of her throat, choking on her own blood and took a step forward, tumbling towards Joel, her arms outstretched, clawing for her father.

"H—hurts, Daddy," she whimpered, her face contorting into a pained grimace, tears pouring down her cheeks.

"Shh, baby girl, I know," he breathed, choking on his own words as he blinked back his tears. Fuck. Not this again. His daughter was cold in his embrace, so much that her skin was warm and burned wherever Joel let his fingertips graze against Sarah's skin, near the wounded site where she'd been shot. "I know it hurts, baby girl, but you gotta…you gotta stay with me, Sarah. I…need you."

Joel glanced down and strained to see through his eyes currently filled with tears and the faded blonde locks of his daughter's hair cradled in his hands. He felt like his heart was pounding and threatening to stop at any moment. He bit the inside of his cheek as Sarah's rasping voice spoke.

"Why didn't you save me, Daddy?" she croaked hoarsely, her voice faint and barely audible. "You could have saved me. T—Take my hand, Daddy…" Sarah whispered. Joel, with shaking fingers, reached and took Sarah's hand in his, groaning as his daughter helped her father to his feet.

If Joel were to tell Ellie or anybody else about this, that Sarah had helped him out of the ravine, that a knock on the head could do strange things to a man, but Joel knew what he saw. What he was seeing. When his vision had quit swimming with black dots in the front of his line of sight and he turned towards Sarah, she was still there, and the trees from the woods behind her was just a blur.

Her voice was clear, her tone soft and shy as she urged Joel to take another step forward out of the woods. Joel let out a sigh and turned away to say something to his baby girl, only to find she had gone. Even now, he could still recall her face. Sarah's eyes were as blue as the sky that fateful day, skin as white as the clouds and hair a soft golden blonde. Where her fingers fell, love soaked in, and though that makes no sense at all it's true. It's like she'd distilled it, purified it and it let flow right from her skin to Joel's, warming his insides, giving the broken, battered man the push forward he needed to keep on, then he would do it, even if it meant Sarah could not be by his side for this.

Sarah stood by her father's side; her hand outstretched for him to take. "C'mon, Daddy," she whispered, and Joel could detect no resentment or hatred in his daughter's voice, and just that alone was enough to make him shed a tear. "Take my hand."

So, he did, and allowed his daughter to guide him out of the woods, towards something bigger.

Towards Ellie.


	6. All Gone Wrong

**CHAPTER SIX**

“First place we’re gonna hit is a pharmacy, an’ probably the only place for today. Don’t wanna start you off as our newest team member with somethin’ too big for you to handle. You do this for me today an’ you don’t fuck it up, an you’ll get a reward,” Jack growled the next day as he put the truck in park and paused outside of the very pharmacy not too far off the beaten path from where Jack and his buddies had nabbed Ellie. “You keep a level head an’ do what I tell you, ain’t no reason for you to make a fuss,” Jack growled as he clambered out of the truck’s driver side of the vehicle and squinted. Only a couple of Infected were close by, Runners by the looks of them. No more than two. Ellie swallowed nervously, her throat feeling dry. It was just the two of them on this run. ‘A test run’, Jack liked to call it. He hadn’t wanted to bring Sam along or any of the others on this particular supply run, claiming he wanted to be able to test Ellie’s abilities for himself, see if the girl lived up to her word. So, here they were, crouching behind the bed of the truck and looking for a good way in.

“You ever killed any Infected before?” Jack asked, narrowing his eyes as he glanced down his nose at the fourteen-year-old’s pale face. Her lips were pursed into such a thin line, he almost thought for a second that the kid didn’t have any. “You gotta have, to stay alive an’ on your own this long, girl.”

“A few,” Ellie whispered nervously, careful to keep her voice low as she lowered her body into a crouch and snaked alongside the bed of the truck and darted into an alleyway sandwiched in between two deserted shops in the hopes of avoiding being spotted by the pair of Runners. “But not… _those_.”

Ellie swallowed and poked her head around the corner of the building, where the pair of Runners sauntered aimlessly in front of the sidewalk that was nearest the main front entrance to the pharmacy.

The very place Jack was trying to get her to. Ellie exhaled a shaking breath and tried to ignore the beads of sweat on her brow. She fucking _hated_ the Runners. They freaked her out the most, more than any of the other stages, and although she wasn’t entirely sure why, Ellie had a feeling she could guess. It was probably because they were the first and weakest stage of the Infected population who’d only until recently just entered their transformation, and was the closest thing resembling the human they had once been prior to becoming one of the Infected. People in the first stage entered into it within one to two days, with ‘increased irritability and hostility towards others being a key symptom,’ according to the doctors’ notes in the Fireflies’ camp that Ellie had found while snooping one night.

Their eyes were the first thing that got targeted by the Cordyceps Brain fungal infection. Runners had poor eyesight, but Ellie hated that they still managed to maintain some of their previous characteristics that made them human. Like the horrible, guttural moans they made from the backs of their throats and the fact that the fungus and disease and general rot of the world in its state of decay these days hadn’t quite gotten to their clothes yet, pretty much the only way for someone to tell them apart from a normal non-infected human being was their glowing orange eyes, which freaked Ellie out.

Runners tended to stay in a hunched over position whenever they weren’t moving around, or when moving around passively, not in the way normal humans walked. Their movements became stilted and their body language sluggish whenever the Runners were inactive or passive, which Ellie thought was kind of odd. She wondered if there was a part of the old person still in there, and if that particular behavior was a way of the human side of their brain, if any of it was left, was trying to resist the fungus’s influence, though that usually amounted to in vain and was for nothing. Cordyceps always took over. Always.

_Except for me. Guess I’m the only one in this world who’s immune to this crazy shit_ , she thought wildly, and without even realizing it, instinctively felt her hand drift to her arm, where it hovered over the sleeve of her long sleeved black sweater. Jack noticed, frowning.

“Somethin’ wrong with your arm, kid? You got a scratch?” he asked, furrowing his brows in thought. Ellie noticed and blanched, immediately jerking her other arm away and letting it fall loose by her side limply.

“N—no,” she stammered, feeling the heat creep to her cheeks. The less people knew about her bite, the better. She didn’t want Jack and his boys asking dumb fucking questions, questions that she wasn’t even sure she could know the answer to. Ellie frowned and turned her attention back to the Runners. There were only two of them that she could see, though there was always the possibility of there being more. Ellie thought it was kind of weird how, in all her time traveling with Joel, Runners didn’t seem to attack at all sometimes, even if a normal person was standing right in front.

Non-aggressive Runners, Ellie and Joel liked to call them, and she noticed they tended only to sprint at them if they were attacked first or if an object was thrown at or near them, something Ellie had learned the hard way, or if you got way too close to them and invaded their personal space, that’s when the Runners went berserk and tried to fucking attack you. Kind of like whenever someone sneezed, the urge for these assholes to attack happened involuntarily by the host. Joel’s favorite method of dealing with Runners tended to be sneak up behind them if there was only one and strangle them, though Ellie knew she wasn’t strong enough to do something crazy like that to them. No fucking way. She preferred to sneak past them and just avoid being seen if Ellie could help it, which is what she was going to have to do in this situation if she wanted to have a fool’s hope of a chance of getting into the pharmacy that Jack wanted her to raid. She was going to have to move fast.

Jack nodded. “Good. You get into any trouble an’ just holler. I’ll keep these assholes off your tail for you.”

In and out. Runners had an easier time than humans when it came to spotting Ellie, which she thought was kind of odd, considering how fucked up their eyes got. She wondered if the early stages of the Cordyceps Brain Infection messed with their eyesight. She knew stages 2 and 3 did, but no one knew much about Stage 1. Ellie swallowed nervously and crept behind several abandoned cars, sideswiping a knocked over crumpled soda can that she knew if she accidentally kicked it, she’d be in for a world of shit since the noise would no doubt alert the Runners to her presence. “You got this, El, you can do this. Just in and out, like the man said…” she whispered through clenched teeth and dove through the open window of the pharmacy once she got within jumping distance. Ellie let out a hiss as she drew in a sharp breath as the shuffling sound of one of the Runners’ feet compelled her to peek over the edge of the window, and she gulped as the Runner spotted her and Ellie exhaled a shaking breath through her nose.

Most of the time, these fucktards didn’t bolt for you unless they were provoked. But then the thing turned its head towards her, still crouched down in that stooped over way that always made them look like they were fighting off a bad stomachache, and Ellie froze. The Runner had one ear missing and both its lips had been bitten off, it looked like it had been bitten off. Her fingers twitched as her right hand hovered near the hilt of her knife, but she couldn’t bring herself to kill it.

“J—Joel? Oh, fuck, no, please don’t be one of them. Don’t do this to me, Joel…” she whispered, hating hearing the crack and dip in her voice. She was startled at how much, at least upon first glance as she dared to inch forward, slowly, how much the sick man looked like Joel. Same dark hair and beard and everything. Even the plaid shirt he wore was a close enough of a match. Ellie blinked back tears and swallowed past the hardening lump in her throat, and then the Runner blinked and she realized it wasn’t Joel, and she felt herself give out a tense exhale, and the tense stiffness in her shoulders slowly leave her.

For a second, she thought it _was_ him. One hand had been mangled, and his right bicep was almost chewed away, exposing the white humeras beneath. This poor fucker had been scalped by some botched attempt to slay him, and as the thing drew in each rattling, moaning breaths, he made a low growling noise that chilled Ellie’s blood. Its dirty orange eyes staring at her, though whether or not the Runner could actually see Ellie was up for debate, but whatever. It looked so…empty. Like devoid of life. The Runner’s skin was like crinkled paper, its jaw open way too wide to display a set of rotting yellow teeth stained with crimson blood. The veins were about to burst from the guy’s head.

Old and dried blood was splattered like red paint all over his face and hands, his hands like sticks with their flesh almost falling off, but the nasty ass disgusting rotting nails were what grossed Ellie out and she gagged just looking at them. Torn off from the fingers hanging on the edge, they seemed like a drowning man holding onto a stick in the middle of a lake, about to drown at any time, and it was this thought just by itself that prompted Ellie to unsheathe her knife and slit its throat, effectively putting the Joel look-alike Runner out of its long-suffering misery finally.

Once the creature was well and truly dead, she shifted her backpack, adjusting the straps for a more comfortable fit, and made her way deeper into the pharmacy, the little sticky note of supplies Jack was after clutched in her hand. The air around her was heavy with the smell of dead bodies and burnt flesh, and the dark consciousness of Ellie’s mind momentarily hoped that while Jack was waiting out there for her to come back, he got fucking eaten alive.

When Ellie had been older enough, maybe around ten, she could remember Marlene and some of the other survivors in the Fireflies’ camps that when the infection first started spreading, that it was like something out of the fucking Bible, when everyone started getting the Cordyceps Brain infection, saying it was God’s punishment, to send the Four Horsemen of Death. Marlene had told her once over dinner that when the Four Horsemen would come and watch the world burn from the saddles of their black stallions, it was the closest thing demons could come to happiness.

There was a whole entire world for the four of them to kill and not a goddamn thing to stop it happening. Ellie snorted as she meandered the aisles, slowly gathering supplies like painkillers, meds, food, packages of instant noodles. She all thought it was a bunch of bullshit, really. IF there was an all powerful God and He existed, then what kind of fucking God would let this happen to a world that He claimed to love? Huh?

Death was gonna come for every last one of them, in the end, and there was nothing, not even Ellie could do to try to stop that, honestly. The only fucking thing that mattered to Ellie was finding more supplies and finding a way to sneak away from Jack undetected. The only thing she wanted to do more than anything was find Joel, damn it.

They’d gone through too much shit to give up on each other now, but if she wanted to have any hope of escaping, she had to find food, and a decent enough way to sneak out of the back of the pharmacy undetected and give the fucking creepy leader of the Liberators the slip. Oh, they’d liberated her all right. Of her fucking freedom.

“Buncha cocksuckers,” she growled angrily through gritted teeth. Ellie heaved an exasperated sigh through her nostrils as she considered herself lucky to have survived in the wilderness on her own without Joel around for as long as she had. Any number of things could have happened to her up to the point where Jack and co. found her.

Traveling alone, while not her favorite method, but certainly proving itself to be the most efficient, had helped. She considered herself in pretty good shape and agile, could run really fast when it came down to it, but sooner or later, what she really needed, Joel or no Joel, but preferably with Joel, given everything that had happened, was to make it to Salt Lake City and see how she could help the Fireflies procure a cure for this goddamned infection. She knew in the long run she couldn't stay alone forever, though it was easier in the short term since the further distance and a cold detachment she maintained to any people that she came across, it meant she wouldn't get her heart broken when they died from a horde attack or some other means. It was just…easier. Easier, but harder, for sure.

Ellie sighed. Ellie shifted her backpack again and poked her head around the corner of the food aisle. Nothing here worth taking. But now…she was starting to doubt her idea to come here. Ellie drew in a sharp breath that pained her lungs as she looked around. She hadn’t really thought of a game plan for what happens next.

Once she’d collected all the food that she could in her pack, then what? Sneak out the back? But what if Jack was waiting for her there? She worked quickly, swiping up several packets of instant noodles that she could come across, her mind screaming at her, willing her body to do a happy dance at the thought of food— _real_ food—not berries for a change. Ellie swiped the last three bottles of water, and a couple bottles of soda, the individual kind, not the big liters, and stuffed them into her bag. The girl moved swiftly and nimbly through the store, grabbing a couple bags of chips and candy, and stuffing them as far down into her backpack as she could go.

When she was confident her bag was full, she ducked behind the corner of the window, peeking her head out just slightly to check for any signs of the infected. "I think the coast is clear, Nuts," she whispered, glancing down affectionately at the tiny Beanie Baby squirrel stuffed in her front jeans pocket and gave it a little affectionate pat.

Joel had found the little thing for her on a shelf in a Walgreens once during a supply run, and given it was clean and was pretty much brand new, he’d given it to her, sort of as a sentimental token or some such bullshit. Though there was a part of her that really liked the damn little thing. It was one of the mini Beanie Babies, the kind the McDonald’s used to sell, and the tiny squirrel called Nuts quickly became her only travel companion over the two weeks she’d wandered without Joel by her side. Ellie kind of liked that she could tell the squirrel pretty much anything and it wouldn’t run its fucking mouth. _All I need is another friend for Nuts and name it Balls and then I'd have Nuts and Balls_ , Ellie thought darkly to herself as she stepped outside. Her sense of humor, especially over the last few weeks the more isolated she became was kind of an acquired taste. You had to get used to Ellie.

Ellie groaned, thumping her palm down her forehead, dragging it along the side of her face in exasperation.

"Oh my God, I really am going crazy. Talking to a stuffed plush squirrel like it can actually talk back to me…" She bit her bottom lip hard enough to bleed and started walking.

"I think it's cute. You're not crazy. I do it all the time," a man's voice grinned, a low chuckle escaping his mouth, eliciting a startled cry from the young girl as she whirled around, instinctively drawing her knife.

The dagger was small and somewhat unassuming with its plain wooden handle. Marlene had given it to her when the world had started going to shit, just in case, though she told Ellie that she hoped she would never have to use it.

For all its bland looks, it was the sharpest knife Ellie owned. The dagger currently lay cold in her hands. It was short at four inches but so sharp even the most gentle of touches to flesh would result in a free bleeding cut, and she made sure this asshole knew this as she pressed the tip of her blade into the column of the guy's throat, not hard enough to pierce the skin, but definitely forceful enough to enforce her intended message:

_Stay away from me…or else._ The man standing in front of her was smirking at her, which made Ellie feel uneasy. Though she supposed he looked kind enough, though he was kind of leaning against one of the pharmacy shelves and she exhaled sharply as the guy stepped forward into the light, and her shoulders relaxed. It was one of Jack’s guys. “Fuck, man, you fucking scared me!” she whisper-shouted, trying to stop the shaking in her voice and in her hands. “It’s…Vic, right?” she asked, biting the inside of her cheek. On either side of his straight nose were two blazing dark brown eyes. Spiked, warm brown fringed with smooth green. His dark brows were actually graceful, but currently furrowed in a frown. All of it was framed by a thick tuft of straight black hair, currently hidden under a ball cap.

"Yeah, that’s me. You wanna point your fucking knife away from my throat, kid? Calm down! Easy," he soothed, his hands raised above his head, showing Ellie he meant the kid no harm. "I—I didn't mean anything by it, Ellie."

Ellie scowled, but hesitantly lowered her knife. “How the fuck did you follow us? Where’s your goddamn car?”

He pointed a slightly shaking finger towards the outskirts of the city. Ellie's heart sank. The woods. The last place she wanted to go back. Still, something about the older man's voice gave Ellie pause. He did kind of have a nice soothing voice, and it was pleasant to listen to. Though she'd never tell _him_ that. "What are you doing here, Vic? I thought Jack said no one else was gonna come along on this run. Why fucking follow us, asshole, you got a thing for me or something? I’m fourteen, remember?” she accused, suddenly feeling disgusted as she breathed, feeling her eyes go wide and round. How the fuck had he managed to follow them without Jack catching onto his behavior?

"Easy, kid. I fucking walked," he began shakily. "I know you wanna get outta here. Find your dad. Me and Sam were actually thinking about leaving. We can’t stand anymore of Jack’s bullshit. Man’s arrogance is gonna get him killed if he ain’t careful. I know another group that lives in those woods I just came out of. I was checking with them to see if they could use a couple more. I dunno bout you, kid, but I fuckin’ _hate_ takin’ orders from that asshole. Prick thinks he knows better’n anyone how to stay alive just cause he ain’t one of the Infected yet. I call bullshit. I got friends mostly, folks I met on the road. They're good people, I think you'd like them, and we can always use more people. More people we have, better our chances of surviving." He glanced down at Ellie and breathed out a shaking breath. "You and your… _squirrel_ are welcome to join me and come with us if you want."

Ellie scowled, furrowing her brows into a frown as she felt his gaze drift downwards towards her jeans pocket, where his eyes had settled on Nuts. She felt her defenses immediately begin to flare up, but something about the man's voice sounded kind and gave her pause, so she lowered her knife, sheathing it at last. "I’d like that, man. More than you know. I just wanna get the fuck out of here and find Joel," she said reluctantly, after a long pause. "Sorry," she apologized in a tone that suggested she wasn't sorry at all. Vic nodded, and motioned for her to follow him.

"Keep low, stay quiet, and try not to die," he whispered, careful to keep his voice low. She nodded in acknowledgement and followed his grueling pace without complaint. The warm humidity of the afternoon made her feel sticky and suffocated. Her clothes and hair, slick with perspiration, clung to her skin. She swatted another pesky insect. Sweat rolled down her skin in thick, salty beads.

She could feel her heart throbbing inside her chest. Her skin felt like it was roasting. She began bouncing slightly as she jogged, which wore her out quickly. She settled to stumbling along behind him as fast as she could. Ellie was vaguely aware of a stinging in her leg. She was exhausted by noon. By then they had reached the stream. She went to her knees and filled her water bottle, trying to catch her breath.

Her lungs felt like they would burst, and her throat was so dry.

"Damn," Vic swore under his breath not even five minutes after they had stopped, and Ellie felt her head whiplash up to the right, straining to look to see what this possible new ally saw that she had missed.

"Oh," she breathed. It was all she could say, really.

The strange humanoid stomped into the forest clearing. As Ellie stole a glance at its face, the girl saw something horrific. The sight could turn you to stone. A Stalker was headed right towards Ellie and Vic, its gaze fixated on its prey. Its snake-like emerald green eyes darted around with emotionless eyes, its rotting lips were already half destroyed. She heard the bones crack as his neck turned and then a blood curdling moan. It spotted the pair of them. Death walked towards her.

Without even waiting for Vic, who was shouting something inaudible and begged for her to stop and wait for him, Ellie did what she had to and jumped into the pitch air. The horde of Stalkers was coming closer and closer, their smell becoming even more unbearable. They had deformed bodies, and limbs sticking out at odd angles. Their bloodshot eyes darted over the land, looking for food. Reaching arms, flesh peeling, in short, they were terrifyingly grotesque. Groans and moans came from their open mouths, wanting human meat.

Her heart in her mouth, Ellie ran for her life, only to be met with another Stalker not even thirty feet from the creek. Vic, it sounded like, was dealing with the other one. The emaciated man had dirt and grit all over his clothes and grimy body. His dark gray shirt (which used to be white) was tattered and shredded mainly where his heart should be. Ellie should have taken pity on the unfortunate wretch but instead she felt an unexplained loathing at first sight. Even from the end of the forest's edge, closer towards the highway, she could see his cruel, detestable, disturbing smile in a permanent sinister snarl. Sunken, milky white eyes stared with mindless menace into hers.

Ellie wondered briefly, perhaps inappropriately given the desperate situation the two found themselves in, if when someone was turned, if they still felt things, if there was even a shred of the old person left.

She doubted it, but still, she had to wonder. Suddenly, the skeletal creature started shuffling towards me like a decrepit, decaying old man. As he got closer, Ellie could see that he had a dislocated jaw showing his torn tongue and blood-stained, razor sharp, savage teeth. Unexpectedly, a flame of anger seemed to ignite within him. He let out a piercing screech and charged towards Ellie with ape-like fury. As he ran, she could tell that this thing outweighed her by several pounds, possibly more than twenty, and her little dagger wouldn't help her out.

She _really_ wished she had a motherfucking gun. What she wouldn’t give for one. Ellie barely opened her mouth to scream when she felt something cold and hard strike the back of her head. "Wha…?" Ellie glanced up wearily to see Vic staring at her, with cold, dark eyes, and she had no time to react as he brought his fist down on her face. Ellie's eyesight blurred, but not because tears were welling up.

_It was a fucking goddamned trap_ , she thought angrily, helplessly. _This cocksucker set me up and I fell for it. Goddamn_ it. _And now he’s killed me. Murder. He’s fucking murdering me, a—and I can’t…murder…kill…I go now…._ Everything became fuzzy; then she saw nothing at all and heard nothing except for a strange ringing in her ears, like tinnitus. Her consciousness was floating through an empty space filled with a thick static. Throughout the inky space her heartbeats pounded loudly, echoing in her ears, alongside fading pleas for help and what sounded like the muffled growls of the Stalkers that she wasn't even sure what was happening to them, if they had eaten Vic and Jack yet.

Feeling in her body drained away until finally all was black


	7. A Tense Conversation

**Chapter Seven**

Ellie groaned and opened her eyes as her vision slowly but surely fucking cleared.

“Fuck _me_ , this really fucking hurts,” she growled, feeling her head throb and pound at the back of her skull where Vic had pummeled her with something really fucking hard. “Where…am…I?” she groaned, moving her fingers behind her head and felt the soft pillow. Wherever the hell it was, she was in some kind of bedroom.

_Did this asshole take me back to their fucking camp? Am I somewhere new?_

All these thoughts and more were swirling around in her tired head. Her body felt strangely numb and yet at the same time ached all over. Her mind churned as she struggled to regulate her breaths to something that resembled normalcy, already clamoring for relief to come to her. Glancing upward from the bed she found herself in, she tried to steady herself, attempting to comprehend what was going on around her and what part of the warehouse this was. Her body felt as though it had been bruised in every way possible.

Her legs felt shaky and were she not already lying down, if she had been standing, she felt sure she would have fainted. Ellie clenched her eyes shut as her face contorted.

Never had she experienced such a horrible pain in her life. She could feel her head—or was that the room?—spinning ultimately, as her jaw clenched and she collapsed back against the pillow in a horrible fatigued exhaustion.

She let out a tiny groan and there was a horrible constricting on her throat, like the weight itself was sucking out her last breath. Ellie sighed, her once tranquil face now seeming like she was struggling just to breathe, and you could see it in her eyes. Slowly, the pressure within her throat tightened. Ellie sat up straighter against her pillows, her fingers curling into a tight fist around the strangely soft fleece blanket.

The girl furrowed her brows into a frown as she glanced down at the strange blanket by which someone had draped the thing over her during sleep. Strange. “What kinda fucking shit is this?” she snarled, attempting to free herself from the wretched thing that was unfamiliar. Ellie heaved a groan and put a shaking hand to her forehead. Her poor head from where the back of her skull had hit the wall from when Vic had hit her to subdue her and keeping her from bolting from these insane assholes, throbbed. The pain felt like someone had taken a knife to her skull. She rested her head back against the pillow.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she swallowed hard past the growing lump in her throat and the swells of nausea, willing the pain to go away. The ache was dull, as if some lazy torturer were standing right behind her, applying just enough pressure to be an annoyance. It sat there, just to the right of her shoulder blade towards her spine, where Ellie knew Vic had thrown her against the wall. She could imagine it would be like lying on a large sheet of glass. Perhaps at first the sensation would be cool and pleasant, but then again it would hurt like a motherfucking son of a goddamned bitch. The rest of her little world here in the dank bedroom had become detached. All Ellie could concentrate on was the pain rooted deep in her head. She could barely hear other voices chattering around her, unaware of people coming and going, no doubt to check on her. Everything was a hazy blur.

All she felt, all she knew, was the pain of this moment. Ellie let out another groan and glanced around her room at the strangely unfamiliar surroundings. Even as that very thought crossed her mind, she immediately dismissed it, thinking it ludicrous, that she had been under the impression that the other day, when Sam had given her the full tour that she’d explored every nook and cranny of this building, No candles were lit to provide light or warmth and the room was bathed in shadow, but the young man’s brown eyes burned as bright as a midnight torch, umber brown against black.

 _Sam. Sam’s here with you. Saved you. The kid’s name is Sam, and he saved your life_ , her conscience guided her, almost sounding frantic, and Ellie knew if she were to open her mouth, she’d sounded panicked. Ellie swallowed nervously as she could practically see the loathing that spiraled in the man’s eyes, no doubt a result of the trouble that she had caused him in him having to stop and rescue her. She had been hoping, maybe foolishly so, that Joel would have found her while she’d been passed the fuck out and had killed these creeps, but now, as she looked into the deep pools in this man’s eyes, Ellie was unnerved, given that the only emotion she could read was disdain and dislike. A hatred for her, of which Ellie felt she was undeserving of, as she had done nothing wrong.

Or…had she? Had she somehow fucked this up by allowing herself to get fucking kidnapped? Did Jack even know that Vic was getting up to no good shit like this?

Vic had hit her harder than she thought. Ellie swallowed nervously. The young redhead knitted her brows together in confusion and felt one arch in the man’s general direction as she bluntly refused to avert her gaze from his eyes, nor he, it would seem, from hers.

There was something else in the man’s brown eyes, now darkened to an almost blackened hue, much like Joel’s eyes tended to darken whenever he was angry about something (which, thank the gods, was rare), something that Ellie was not sure she could quite identify. Something that strangely resembled hatred, and worse…a frustrated desire.

For _her_. Ellie gulped, blinking. She did not know how to react.

She inhaled a sharp breath of frigid cold air that wafted in through the open window of the bedroom as a shaft of light momentarily illuminated the little room that was more a prison cell than a fucking broom closet, and Ellie realized with a heavy pit forming in her stomach that Sam’s right hand was pushing down against her pillow, just beside her ear, and his left hand lingered above the pale column of her throat, which was highly inappropriate, causing her frown to deepen and a groove to form near the edges of her lips, but Ellie decided to give the young man who had saved her life the benefit of doubt.

Ellie felt a tremor of fear and something that could only be described as exhilaration as she felt the blanket slowly slid to the floor, and she was exposed in an oversized t-shirt.

Someone, probably this creep, had to hazard a guess, had changed her clothes into something cleaner and more comfortable while she’d been asleep.

That blanket had acted as the only barrier which separated this stranger against her body. Ellie bit the inside of her cheek as she could see the perspiration that glistened on his thick dark brows, currently furrowed together in a disapproving little frown, his inhales, the faint stench of fading wine on his breath, which almost made Ellie crinkle her nose in disgust. She let out a hiss as the palm of his hands felt smooth against the skin of her collarbones, how they were cold and practically trembling with fear told Ellie one thing.

That the man’s foundations were his own fury and pain, his own cross to bear, and it all currently dripped as poisonous venom to her breast. Ellie steeled the muscles in her face, refusing to avert her gaze first. So long as she appeared nonchalant, no pinkness in her cheeks to betray her, everything would be just fine, and Sam would have no reason to hate her. As usual, she could not hide her problems for more than a few seconds, but what on earth could she do? Ellie was trained to mask panic with apathy the day she became old enough for her to understand that the world had gone to shit in a handbasket.

However, Ellie was beginning to wonder if this was a mistake, not giving in to the man’s ire like this, because she let out a breathy little squeak as the man’s strong fingers gripped around her neck deeper, and she felt her lips part open and struggle to draw in more air.

 _He wouldn’t_ , she thought, her green eyes widening shock. _Not after he saved my life_. Ellie gasped with the effort to remove the man’s fingers from her throat, clawing pitifully at his hands, and it was only when she started coughing that Sam’s eyes widened and he relinquished his grip upon her throat, as though the very feel of her skin against his own had burned him. Sam faltered backwards, and, upon seeing a chair tucked away in the corner of the bedroom, seemed to think that more efficient that standing and lingering in the shadows with his arms folded across his chest and a scowl on his lips so he closed off the gap of space between his current location by Ellie’s bedside and the corner of the room. He flinched as the chair’s legs noisily scraped alone the cold stone floor of the room and did not speak to Ellie until he had gotten himself situated in the chair next to her bedside.

“I do not think I need to explain to you why your behavior this morning was so fucking stupid, kid,” he growled, his deep dark voice echoing like thunder upon Ellie’s ears.

A tense and tired exhale escaped him that was quickly drowned out by the sound of Ellie turning her head to the side and coughing, gasping for air, wildly inhaling until her heart pace resumed its normal beating, and she sighed and closed her eyes as she tried to force her body to relax, her fingers resuming tight fists around the blanket that she hastily picked up off the floor to cover herself and preserve as much of her modesty as possible.

The way his eyes narrowed to mere slits and resembled that of a pit viper’s pupils sent a shiver down Ellie’s spine as he glowered at her, his arms folded across his chest. Ellie had never particularly approved of the terms ‘monster’ or ‘demon’ to describe someone like Sam, who was unfortunate enough to be afflicted with those burn scars on his face and littered throughout his arms, all of them results of Jack putting out cigarette butts on his own son.

It seemed too far cruel words for someone who she knew had more to offer than just their skillset. There was more to Sam than he was letting on. Ellie knew this for a fucking fact.

However, now as Ellie blinked owlishly at the man who had saved her life, she could think of no other word, his dark silhouette seeming like he towered over her, even while sitting in his chair like he was, the faint light streaming in from outside coming to rest on his scars.

She could come up with no other term than to describe him now in his current agitated state. _Monstrous_ , she thought, and shivered, her fingers tightening upon the blanket as she cocooned herself in it. Ellie let out a muffled squeak of fear as he practically barked at her.

“Have you gone deaf, now? I asked you a question. Answer me!” he growled, and Ellie shivered at the words which had poured unchecked and unprovoked from his lips as she thought of him. The way he was behaving made her think of the other one from earlier.

_Vic_. Just the thought of the dark-haired asshole’s name was enough to chill her blood to ice in her veins, and she shivered, and though Sam scowled at her lack of response, he made no mention of the teenager’s growing discomfort, for which she was grateful. Ellie flinched and shirked away as the younger man seated next to her snarled, not out of fear per say, but she hadn’t exactly anticipated waking from sleep to find him hovered over her, his hand on her throat like that, and was ill prepared to offer him an apt response to his query, let alone one that would satisfy him. She swallowed nervously.

“I—I was just….” Ellie stammered, biting the inside of her cheek as she attempted to sit up straighter, all the while clutching the edges of the blanket draped over her lap tightly.

But Sam did not give Ellie a chance to respond as he promptly held up a hand and cut her off, folding one leg over the other and still keeping his arms folded across his chest. “It is clear you do not need to explain yourself to me. You are a foolish little girl who has no regard for the meaning of your own life,” he growled angrily. “It was _stupid_ of you to risk your life by trying to think you could fucking run from my Dad. You’re an _idiot_ ,” he snarled.

Ellie ceased her nervous fidgeting with the blankets and as her movements stilled, she looked up at Sam in astonishment, as the briefest flickers of fear and anger darted through her green eyes. She felt her lips part open in shock, but no words immediately came to her.

Ellie watched as Sam sighed and looked at her with those dark brown eyes. So far, in the short span of two days of knowing this man before her at best, she had never seen any emotion in them but contempt. But now, it looked as though they embraced the wind. Ellie thought the man’s eyes were the type of brown like a sweet decadent chocolate.

The chocolate that melted at the slightest bit of heat from love or from happiness, of which Ellie could suspect that this man knew nothing but, given by the bitterness and self-loathing in his tone as he spoke to her. And that chocolate could also grow hard from the cold harsh reality of their lives in this apocalyptic world. Heartbreak, or the depression that Sam hid from all those around him so well. Those were his eyes, so intense, that Ellie could not avert her gaze. And even now, as Sam’s dark piercing gaze glinted at her through the darkness of the bedroom, his voice sounded listless, dull in nature, and Ellie decided she didn’t like it. She drew in a breath and held it, pursing her lips into a thin rigid line as the man leaned back in his chair, concealing his face once more in the shadows, so that all she could see were those brown pinpricks that were his eyes.

She let out a barely audible whimper of fear, closing her eyes. And though Ellie could no longer read the emotions in Sam’s face since he was effectively hiding from her more or less, she could sense he was not angry but strangely bitter. But why? He had no place in her life. This man was merely a stranger to her, as she was to him. They were not emotionally invested in one another. He should not care for her like this.

Ellie did not have enough to process why he was behaving so strangely, why he had stayed with her like this, seemingly watching her while she slept, with no one else in the room.

Just that fact alone was enough to disturb her. “Wh—where did Vic go?” she breathed in a slightly shaking breath as she felt her fingers’ grip loosen upon the blanket and she let her hands fall to her lap as she cast her gaze downward to her lap, no wanting to meet his eyes.

“Upstairs,” he answered curtly, his voice taking on a hardened edge, clipped, impatient.

“Keep him the fuck away from me?” Ellie asked, biting her bottom lip, and sticking it out in a slight pout. She could not explain it, but the longer she stayed in this man’s company, the more nervous she felt and…and… _warm_. Which she thought most peculiar given how cold it was in here. Furrowing her brows into a frown, she placed a hand upon her forehead. Still warm.

Sam frowned and rolled his eyes, scoffing and he did not immediately answer. “As soon as we’re done talking, I’ll tell Dad what happened here,” he snapped, his tone sounding impatient.

Ellie sat rigidly against the bedroom’s wall, propped up against the two thick pillows as best she could, watching as the man’s foot began to tap restlessly. She swallowed back her fear and nausea and tried not to shiver while all the while waiting with gritted teeth.

Whatever it was that Sam wanted of her, whatever ‘this’ happened to be, Ellie wanted nothing more than for their conversation to be over and left alone to sleep.

If the guy had scornful words to present to her and for she to have no choice but to accept them and take his ‘advice’ to heart, then so be it, and she wanted nothing more than to exit this bedroom that smelled slightly of mold and return to the house she and Joel had bunkered down in for a few weeks, little more than a cottage when he’d been recovering from sepsis. However, their exchange thus far, Ellie had to admit, had been an odd one.

Ellie felt her heart sink to the pit of her stomach as he continued to glare at her, which in turn not only made her feel quite hopeless, but also she felt the beginning surges of anger well within the pit of her stomach and creep its way at a petty pace up her throat in the form of bile. She swallowed it back, that hot fire seed of anger better than any dragon in the make believe stories she used to have Marlene tell her at bedtime when she was younger, and waited for Sam to say something— _anything_ —just to break the thick uncomfortable tension in the room. Ellie had been fully expecting and prepared to receive a few harsh words, a scolding from Jack. Joel, definitely, if he had been here with her, but not Sam. Not like this.

But not from her savior. Not from the very man who had saved her life. Ellie felt herself frown as she lifted her chin slightly, jutting it out in defiance to meet the man’s wrathful glower. Finally, he spoke, effectively shattering the silence. “Ellie. What the fuck were you thinking, huh? Didn’t I fucking tell you, we had to wait for the right goddamned time? You are intelligent enough to know why going out while it was still dark out is an extremely foolish thing to do,” he began, shifting in his chair to face Ellie better, his irritable expression with the teenager still very much intact, much to Ellie’s dismay. No longer was his voice deep and rich and melodious, like it had been just outside the warehouse, or even in the alleyway when he’d come to her aid.

Now, Sam’s tone was rough and coarse, which in a strange way, put Ellie’s frazzled mind at ease. In her mind, it gave her savior a sense of vulnerability, which up until this point in their very much one-sided conversation, him taking the lead, had been absent. He sighed and leaned forward in his chair, peeking at her precariously through the dim light that streamed in through the window of the bedroom. It looked like it was going to rain.

Ellie blinked owlishly and shoved mindless thoughts of the weather aside for now.

The man looked exhausted, the skin under Sam’s eyes darker and sallow-looking, as if he hadn’t slept well in the last few nights. This at the very least if nothing else, he had in common with Ellie. Sam cocked his head to the side and regarded Ellie precariously through the shadows as though she were some exotic, unstable creature.

The irony of which, Ellie thought, was not at all missed by the sharp-witted fourteen year old. She had, she was pleased to admit, inherited Marlene’s natural thirst for learning and the Fireflies’ leader’s general love of books and the many stories they told them, and frequented many a night in the camp’s little makeshift library, reading anything Ellie could get her hands on.

His wild tuft of short blond hair tended to stick up in tufts, some bits shorter than others.

Ellie blinked owlishly at her savior as Sam’s scathing voice brought her back to her present conflict at hand. It was not exactly the statement that she had been expecting, honestly. She had been fully expecting him to call her ‘bitch’ or ‘whore’ or any number of horrible, brutally cutting thing that Sam could think of to cut her down in this moment, which would most assuredly not help her temper, nor how she felt about matters, not when she still was feeling ill and quite miserable, if she were being honest with herself right now.

“I—me and your dad were out on a run, a—and Vic found me in the pharmacy and…”

Sam stared at her, his dark brown eyes that haunting rich umber a muddle of qualm. “You were in a pharmacy alone with that fucking jackass," he growled flatly. "Let me just _process_ this,” he snapped, the edges of his voice growing cold and hard, which made Ellie wince. “You ventured out into the city without telling me. You went with Dad without telling _anyone_ where you were going, so you could try to make a run for it without me,” he spat. “That’s pretty goddamned stupid of you, don’t you think, Ellie?” he snarled.

The words dripped from his tongue like poisoned honey, angry and full of rage, and yet coming from his voice, it sounded…strangely sweet. Ellie blinked; the moment vanquished almost as soon as it had come as she processed the disgruntled man’s words to her. She seethed. “Well, then I guess we’re _both_ disappointed in each other, then,” Ellie retorted hotly, her fingers curling around her blanket as she sat up straighter in the bed. “I—it’s not as if you were any different. You could have fucking come with! You were outside, as I was!”

She jumped and let out a squeak of fear as Sam balled his hand into a fist and slammed it down onto the small wooden night table, which was placed precariously next to her bedside.

“It is different with me!” shouted Sam hoarsely, glowering at the young woman from where he sat, and as he leaned forward in his chair, doing so only revealed the unhinged, slightly deranged look in his eyes, which frightened Ellie, though she would not give her savior the satisfaction of letting him see just how much he was beginning to scare her and rattle her mind. “You’re just a kid, girl, for you to be out roaming the streets with no guide and no one to watch over you was _stupid_ , and had _I_ not shown up when I had, Vic would have fucking raped you and _killed_ you had I not been there to protect you!” he shouted, narrowing his eyes and exhaling slowly, his fists clenching and un-clenching in his lap, as if he was unsure what to do with them. "I....I know what I am. Monstrous. I know. Just look at me," he snarled bitterly, gesturing with a shaking finger towards his face. His frown deepened and he bared his teeth, still keeping his arms folded across his chest. "The world holds no place for someone like me. I can go wherever I fucking want. But not you."

He fell silent, though he did not avert his angry piercing gaze from Ellie, which was making her feel as though his stare was burning a hole through her very heart.

Ellie knew she was anxious when she could feel the bitter winter breeze more keenly in her eyes. It was that bizarre tear-less stage when her eyes took on a sheen of water and a tension built behind them. She needed to shake it off. Now was not the time nor the right place for her tears. 

Sam blinked, startled by Ellie’s quiet response and his face blanched as he realized that he had inadvertently let something slip. His posture became rigid and hard as he bolted from his chair that he had been sitting in, practically overturning it to make for the door.

His face was shrouded in shadow and his back to her, and she could not make out the features of his face to see if he were troubled by her question, though Ellie knew he was.

Sam sighed and turned slowly, half his face—the unmarked side—shrouded in shadow. Ellie winced and visibly shirked away as she focused on the glint of his eyes. How with just one cold look, the verdict was told. Sam had been reflecting longer than usual, and Ellie felt her face fall, crestfallen, as Sam looked his dark eyes upon her own. His eyes held in them a strange hateful disdain, but…it was more than that, Ellie knew.

There was a sudden tenseness in Sam’s eyes that the bitter slightly older kid wasn’t even trying to mask. His wide open eyes reflected everything at once and yet they saw nothing. Behind them was something more intense than normal thought and the man’s clenched two-day stubble on his strong jawline wasn’t a good sign. Ellie swallowed as she recognized the signs of an outburst, having seen the same look in Joel on those rare occasions he was angry, and she hoped he wouldn’t start shouting.

To her great relief, she watched as his shoulders slumped and her new friend regarded with something akin to pity intermingled with grief in his eyes.

“You were fucking lucky I was there to save your ass, Ellie. I might not be next time, so you gotta learn to watch your back. Or else… But next time you get into a spot of trouble,” he added, almost as if an afterthought, a faint little smirk forming on his lips. “You’re on your own.” He smirked a little at Ellie’s nonplussed expression and left the room. Ellie blinked owlishly as she stared at the open doorway long after Sam’s footfalls had faded to nothing once he’d vacated the bedroom, no doubt to leave the warehouse and go on a supply run, given how much Jack’s hollering voice reverberated off the walls.

Ellie shook her head, unable to comprehend the conversation she had just had. She bit the inside of her cheek and then her tongue and could almost taste the blood welling as she frowned, thinking over Sam’s words. She did not know if it were the taxation of stress brought out by what had happened to her in the alleyway behind the pharmacy or the result of her conversation with Sam and Vic earlier, if she could even call it that as it mostly involved him belittling her choice to try to sneak the fuck away from Jack and his crew before the sun was up, but she knew she would faint whenever her stomach gave out. It felt like her innards were being replaced by some kind of horrible black void.

Then nausea crept from her abdomen to her pounding head, and the world went black.

“Joel, she begged, curling in on herself into a fetal position, silent tears streaming down her face, hoping he could hear her somehow. “Hurry the fuck up and come find me, man.”


	8. Not Alone

**Chapter Eight**

Vic could see Jack coming his way, and from the strange bouncy stride, he knew there was an eerie grin plastered on his boss's face.

So typical for him to be happy in the morning, especially after gettin' laid. Vic had tried to be discreet and pretend like he hadn't heard the ungodly moans coming from Jack's bedroom last night, but everybody knew it was a nightly occurrence for the little blonde girl from Portland, Ohio, they'd picked up a couple nights ago to go to Jack.

Not because she wanted it though. That was a different matter entirely, but because Jack demanded it, and whatever he wanted, the boss man got. That was how it always was for him. Vic dove into his pocket of his vest for his carton of cigarettes, pulling one out and clamping it between his teeth, fumbling with his lighter. When it wouldn't light up, he felt his temper begin to swell.

"Son of a bitch, light, goddamn you," he growled. If he pretended to be busy, act like he had something better to do than talk, then Jack would probably get bored. Then Vic could go back to thinking about their little problem. What the hell Jack was going to do to the little fourteen year old bitch for daring to run off out the back, even Vic didn't know. The ambiguity of not knowing bothered him. There was so much that could go wrong.

"Hey, Vic," slurred Jack's voice. Vic heaved a heavy sigh and let his lighter sink back into his jeans pocket, watching as Molly carried. Not fast enough, goddamn it. "You see the tits on Blondie, man? Gotta admit, she's boring as hell, but those tits." He let out a low whistle and glanced behind him, making sure Molly was out of earshot. "Man, there isn't much I wouldn't do for those." Jack winked, grinning wider. Then he lowered his voice. "Taking her tonight too. Reckon she might put out after a coupla drinks, know what I mean? Hope the fuckin' city has a few bottles left."

Vic _did_ know what Jack meant. It made him sick. Molly wasn't boring, she wasn't just another crackhead meth head bimbo bitch whore, like the type of girls Jack had usually gone for in times past, in the old days before the living dead roamed the streets, eating peoples' organs. Molly was smart. Could hold her own and had a hell of a way with knives.

He merely grunted in response and gave a noncommittal shrug of the shoulders, forcing a grin. "Yeah, man. Maybe." He paused. "What about the other one? She's just a kid. She ran off. What the fuck you gonna do?" Vic didn't think he needed to elaborate to Jack about the girl.

He'd been right on that regard. As soon as Ellie was brought up, Vic watched as his boss's eyes darkened in color, almost black the more upset he got. He stifled the growl forming in the back of his throat and balled his strong hands into fists.

"When I see that goddamned little bitch, I'm gonna give her a beating so bad it'll make Dachau look like a fuckin' paradise an' she'll regret ever leavin' us behind, just you watch, little brother. Stupid bitch thinks she can just up leave during the middle of a supply run? Uh-huh, I don't think so. And she's doin' somethin' to mess with my boy's mind. If she convinces him to leave with her, I'm gonna be even more pissed. That boy's the best runner we got."

"What about your son?" Vic snapped, not sure why he was asking after the kid. The kid barely looked old enough to shave, let alone fawn after a girl like some stupid teenager going through puberty, but still, the idea of the younger man being subject to Jack's wrath simply because he seemed to be becoming friends with the kid didn't sit too well with him.

Jack's frown deepened and his hands, still curled into fists, fell at his sides, clenching and un-clenching in a repeated pattern to prevent him from striking out at something in anger. "My son is gonna be lucky to still keep his dick after this if I find out he fuckin' helped her," he growled. "If I find out he's screwing her, I'll cut his goddamn balls off an' shove them down his throat, make 'im choke on 'em…serves the little worm right for helpin' the kid."

Vic rolled his eyes and scoffed. He had never known Jack to get so goddamn possessive over a single kid. Watching him behave this way was like trying to take a bone from a rabid dog, and a big one. Vic frowned. He didn't bother to correct Jack and tell him the kid was actually smarter than she looked, and would have probably gotten away with it too, had he not shown up when he had to intercept the little bitch from sneaking out the back way.

Something in Jack's tone told him he wouldn't appreciate being corrected, and if Vic tried, he'd be the one next to wind up on the ground with a broken fucking nose bleeding out. Terry came bolting down the stairwell, beads of sweat dripping down his brow, looking winded and thoroughly out of breath.

"Boss, f—forgive me, b—but…didn't know where else to go. I—I went to go take a piss a—and came back to give the girl some food and…well…They're—they're gone. That little bitch took Sam an' ran," he choked out, holding his ribcage and bit the wall of his cheek while he waited for Jack to process what he said. He hadn't meant to blurt it out like that, it had just…happened, and if he was being honest, Jack kind of intimated him.

He could feel the sweat drench his skin, the throbbing of his own eyes, and the thumping of his heart against his chest. His fingers instinctively curled into a fist, nails digging into his scarred palm. Terry couldn't hear his rapid breathing, but he could feel the oxygen flooding in and out of his lungs. Hesitantly, his eyes glanced up towards Jack to try to gauge his reaction. Fear tortured Terry's guts, churning his stomach in tense cramps.

The fear he felt kind of overwhelmed his body, knocking all other thoughts aside and suddenly, he felt drastically exhausted. However, most of all, the fear was making him clam, and that's what scared him the most. Silence gnawed at Terry's insides. Silence hung in the air like the suspended moment before a falling glass shatters on the ground. The silence was like a gaping void, needing to be filled with sounds, words, anything. The silence was poisonous in its nothingness, cruelly underscoring how vapid their conversation had become, and then….

Jack's shout rent the air, shattering the otherwise eerie tranquility.

" **WHAT**?"

* * *

Molly, a young blonde new to the group by a week, she'd missed the initial introduction to the new kid earlier, having been away on a supply run of her own. She stifled a groan and felt like she walked like her limbs didn't really belong to her anymore and each step was a negotiation rather than an order as she lagged behind the rest of the group, trying her hardest to ignore Jack's barking commands. Everything hurt now, they felt like they'd been walking for twelve fucking hours with no break, not rest in sight.

Every goddamn muscle ached and screamed for relief from her pains. Unable to bear anymore, she dipped into her backpack for the small bottle of Ibuprofen that she used sparingly, fumbling the little white pill as she popped it into her mouth, letting the bitter taste settle on her tongue. Her mind felt like it was already clamoring for the pain relief to come. It wasn't necessarily that her suffering was more acute, more that it never left her these days unless she slept, of which she was reluctant to do.

All it would take is one slip up and Jack would be able to slip into her tent and do whatever the hell he damn well pleased. And all because he was their 'leader.' Molly thought it was amazing how such a simple thing like a pill could be a trap door into moments of bliss, a few sweet precious hours of tranquility that to Molly were infinitely better than sex.

The aches felt dull, like some lazy torturer was standing right behind her, only applying enough pressure to be an annoyance. It sat there, just to the side of the right shoulder blade towards the spine, where Jack grabbed her earlier and had screamed at Molly, accusing her of being negligent. Almost as if on cue, Jack hollered at her, barking at her to catch up.

"Let's go! Move your ass, blondie. We can still catch up to 'em if we follow the railroad tracks," he growled, and just by the tone of the man's voice Molly could tell the guy was seething. He was royally fucking pissed. Though she wasn't quite sure if it was at Jack for allowing the two of them to slip away from the campsite undetected or more for himself.

Probably the latter if Molly had to guess, but the young woman really didn't want to, if she was being completely honest with herself right now. Vic had gone off ahead, ever the expert tracker, Jack was allowing his best Hunter to take the lead, though Molly had a sneaking suspicion the man had wanted to talk to Molly alone, for reasons unknown to the young blonde, though she felt like she could guess the topic. The kid, Ellie, Molly thought her name was and Sam, and what they were up to.

Like Molly gave a good goddamn. She didn't care if those two had run away (though a small part of her would be lying if she had confessed to the others that she wasn't at least a little bit relieved that they had.) or they were taking the opportunity to screw like rabbits in the woods. Didn't fucking matter if the kid was fourteen, sixteen, they were into sex and shit like that earlier and earlier these days, to Molly it felt back. She was only twenty-six, but old enough to know teens that usually only had one thing on their minds: fucking.

It wasn't any of her business, and why the boss man was so fixated on getting the girl back, even Molly couldn't begin to understand his reasons. She wasn't even sure if Jack could even fathom his reasons for doing what he did. Panting, heaving, and clutching onto her ribcage to catch her breath, she had to jog, taking long strides to catch up to where Jack was. Jack scowled and furrowed his brow into a frown at seeing her so winded.

"You got a problem, blondie?"

"Yeah, I do," she snapped, not in the mood for Jack's bullshit. " _You're_ the problem, Jack," she growled, jabbing a sharp finger in his chiseled chest, shoving him backward as hard as she could. Not that it did her much good, but still. Molly had something to say, and she wanted to get her point across. "Why the hell are we out here going after those two? They left! They don't want to stay with us. Shouldn't it be their choice? Not yours."

Molly drew in a breath and waited with bated breath, not even aware of the tension in her shoulders while she fully expected Jack to fly into another of his rages and break something of theirs again or go on a drinking binge. She stuck out her bottom lip in a slight pout, waiting. But it didn't come. She blinked owlishly at Jack, for a moment wondering if he had indulged in too much last night and that explained the sudden shift in his personality.

"Hey!" she snapped, snapping her fingers in front of his face, which seemed to break him out of the moment. "You hear me, old man? I asked you a question! Why are we following them? Look, they left. The girl fucking got one over on the whole pack of you and snuck out. I get it. You're pissed. But if they don't want to stay, then why the hell should we force them if they'll just be miserable? Let them take their chances out in the world. Forget them. We got ourselves to think about, old man."

Jack blinked, seemingly snapped out of whatever internal conflict was waging on his mind and had caused him to be out of the moment. He sneered, his lips curling upward into a twisted grimace that gave the man a truly frightening appearance, and Molly heard a tiny gasp of surprise escape her lips as she took a step backward.

She could suddenly understand why Ellie had chosen to leave. She'd seen how this creep looked at her. Molly swallowed hard past the lump forming in her throat and stifled a pained cry of surprise as Jack violently grabbed her wrist and yanked her forward, close enough for him to kiss her if he was of a mind to. Molly crinkled her nose in disgust.

"Don't fuckin' talk to me like that, bitch, you feel me?" he breathed, his voice going dangerously soft and quiet, which Molly immediately knew she hated. "You wanna survive in this fuckin' cruel world, you follow me, understand? Don't ever say no to what I want or even hesitate, dollface. The minute you joined my ranks, you became mine to do with whatever the fuck I want till I tell you to leave. If I tell you to leave. You play your cards right, Blondie, and good things'll happen to you. Disappoint and bad things are comin' your way. I hope you get what I'm sayin', Pretty Miss Molly," Jack growled, his eyes flashing angrily as he reached up a surprisingly tender hand to caress her cheek. "I'm sure you'd like to keep this pretty little face of yours beautiful, now, wouldn't ya? Mind your tongue around me, or you're gonna lose it, doll." Molly stuttered, feeling what little color was left in her face drain, watching as Jack stood there, a sort of toddler expanded to the size of an adult. There was irritation in his anger, a sort of impetuousness.

The young blonde watched as the man's hair wafted in the hot summer breeze, moving over the man's red and weathered skin that yearned for more shade and rest. His dark eyes were beady, mean, and on the small side, as if afraid to let the light in. Jack's mouth was small and rigid, as if only used for the kind of smiles that masked cruelty. Born of a lifetime of suspicion and the special kind of superiority that radiated contempt.

His was one of those mouths that only twitched upwards when a deception was achieved. "You don't like it here with us, you can go on an' crawl back to that fucking freak show of a shithole Portland. If what you tell me about that place is true, you ain't gonna last long."

A small laugh escaped her lips, Molly hardly daring to believe what she was hearing. "Freak show? Oh, man, old man, if you're here, I'm already there." She let out a snicker as Jack opened and closed his mouth like a fish, spluttering and struggling to think of a retort and she turned her back. His face mottled crimson, his eyes popped, his tree trunk neck strained. His words were spat out with the ferocity and rapidity of machine gun fire.

Without wiping the spit from her ashen face, Molly leaned over, perfectly composed and uttered just three simple words.

"I don't care." Jack's fuse simmered and fizzled like a firework in a cold autumn breeze, and then he exploded with unrestrained fury. Molly remained as still as a cadaver and just as pallid, unblinking against the older man's onslaught.

Then with a barely concealed smirk, she turned on the heels of her boots and walked away, pulling the hood of her red hoodie over her choppy blonde pixie cut, her hands shoved in her pockets as though strolling through the city park on a day, not following the railroad tracks to bring back Ellie and Sam back to the campsite, kicking and screaming if they had to. Molly ignored Jack's shouts to get the fuck back here…or else. She briefly heard Vic shout something inaudible to Jack and that momentarily got his attention focused on something else.

"Thank fucking Christ on a goddamned pony. What the fuck did I get myself into," she grumbled darkly, kicking at a pebble with her boot. The feisty blonde with the fiery temper stuck her tongue out at Jack's back as Jack jogged ahead of her to catch up to whatever Vic had spotted. Jack's cold fury burnt with a dangerous intensity. She never worried about the guy's frequent fireworks and red hot sparks. It was these bitterly cold, slow burning rags that threatened to consume him. Molly and everyone else knew the rules.

As long as they followed Jack's lead with no questions asked, everybody was friends and got along like fucking chums. He would talk in his animated colorful way about his life and petty grievances while Molly would pretend to show concern, empathy, and sometimes drop in a helpful suggestion or two at times.

It was just the way of life if you wanted to survive with minimal instances. Molly furrowed her brow into a frown as she saw Vic point towards something. She drew in a sharp breath and held it. A warehouse?

"Ugh. Are we really going to do this? Those two aren't fucking worth all this. If they want to leave then fucking let them go, asshole," Molly scowled, talking more to herself than anyone else in the moment. It was more directed towards Jack than anyone else. Briefly, she wondered what was going to become of Terry once they got back to their camp.

_Maybe Jack'll kill him_ , she thought, and scrunched her nose in disgust. Wouldn't put it past the fucking creep.

Intrigued by whatever the two men were discussing, Molly jogged and paused, lingering behind when she got about a good ten feet away.

"Tracks stop at the edge. They went into the city. Where you wanna look first? Maybe they went to the armory for weapons? You wanted to go there anyways so start there, I guess. If they ain't there, we'll find em. Not like they could have gotten that far ahead of us, Jack. Cool it." Vic murmured to his brother in a low guttural grunt.

Molly had to repress the urge to roll her eyes. Sometimes she wondered if Vic had been brought up by cavemen in a past life. All the guy ever did was grunt and point, make noncommittal noises.

_You aren't a man of many words, but when you do talk, you make it count_ , thought Molly, and for reasons she could not explain, felt an inexplicable swelling of admiration in her chest as Jack made a derogatory comment towards his own son and the fourteen year old girl with an even worse trash mouth than Molly had, and Vic had seemingly had enough. _Maybe there's more to you than just following Jack. Wonder what the hell your story is, Vic_ , she thought, making a mental note to ask Vic later.

"We're goin' after 'em, but I ain't puttin' up with any of your shit anymore, Jack, it's fucking disgusting" growled Vic, seizing his brother by the scruff of his shirt. "You wanna try to bring 'em back with us, we can talk. But we can't force the fucking kid to do anything she doesn't wanna, you feel me, Jack? If she wants to fuckin' leave an' go find that Joel guy she's obsessed with, then we should fuckin' just let her. Let herself get fuckin' killed."

Vic did not give his boss a chance to respond before violently shoving him away, leaving Jack effectively rendered speechless for a third time in one day. _That's gotta be something of a record_ , Molly thought, biting her bottom lip in an effort to keep from erupting into a bought of inappropriate laughter at Jack. If she laughed at him, there was a good chance their leader's hand would meet her face, and it wouldn't be to caress her cheek.

He made to turn away when he froze, something caught his eye. Furrowing his brow into a frown, he knelt in the grass that lay at the edge of the city that separated it from the rest of the woods near the highway.

Scowling, he pursed his lips into a thin line and touched the indentation. It was the marking of a boot print, but not any of theirs, and judging from the looks of how the leaves had been rustled, the way they moved, it quickly became clear to Vic that Jack was not the only one hellbent on following Ellie and Sam.

"Fuck," he growled angrily. It wasn't an Infected's footprint, it was far too neat and coordinated for such a footprint and the blood that had seeped into the forest floor was frseh. Jack noticed the sudden shift in his best Hunter's attitude and knelt, his eyes narrowing until they were mere slits.

He saw what his friend was touching, the indentation in the dirt of another man's boot print and almost growled with the effort to restrain himself from lashing out at something in anger, curling his hands into a fist.

They weren't the only ones following Ellie and Sam.


	9. Just to Talk

**CHAPTER NINE**

_Kill, kill, kill them all, dead, dead, they're all dead. Leave none alive. They'd just come after her, after her, you know it_. The voices raged a constant war inside Joel's head, the infection from his sepsis only worsening the more he took another step forward, whispering evil things to him in the shell of his ear, hissing it like that of a snake, taunting him. It had been like this for the last ten miles.

His face was just the same as whenever he was pissed off or stressed the fuck out, which at the moment, he very much fucking was, buckling under the strain of getting Ellie away from these assholes.

Joel had followed one of them, asshole's name was Terry, back to the camp and had thought he'd been fucking having another hallucination brought out by bout of his infection in his ribcage.

Sarah had pointed out the creep's car when he'd finally made it to the edge of the woods that separated the forest from the rest of civilization and had in a few choice words that were she alive today, he would have scolded her for saying, and pretty much told him to follow it, so he'd hijacked a truck of his own and now here he was, and he thought for certain, this was another bad nightmare. This was nuts.

"What the fuck kinda fuckin' frat bullshit is _this_?" he growled, his eyes widening in disgust and revolt at the huge Bloater this group of Hunters had chained to a pole outside the warehouse. "What in the goddamned fuck…? Who the fuck _are_ these people? Ellie, baby girl, what the hell is this _shit_?"

Bullets lay on the ground, each one as cold as the frigid fucking gray winter air around the warehouse out in the middle of goddamned nowhere, though the city was maybe a ten minute drive, at best. The cheapest way by far to dispatch a human being.

For less than a cent you can kill someone irreplaceable. You can take someone off the earth permanently, be the one their nightmares lead to. Joel bent to the floor and picked up a single bullet, so light, so cold. He turns it in the brilliant light of the morning, golden between his soil covered fingers before letting it fall back to the concrete.

Each one was a dead child, a dead mother, a dead father. They were nothing trinkets designed to take the only thing that really matters – life, and in the end, the grand scheme of things, life was insignificant. Their lives as light as air, much like a candy wrapper in the wind. There one minute and then gone the next. Joel knew a thing or two about taking a life, having been a Hunter himself once.

He maintained a cool detachment to his targets. Mostly he preferred not to think of them, but when he did it was as if they were already dead - walking meat bags waiting to be dispatched to the butcher. He thought of them as meeting their destiny and he was merely the conduit. Everyone has to die sometime, and he considered it a good way to go. No illness, no drawn-out goodbyes. They were just happy and oblivious one second and gone the next. Simple. Convenient. Painless.

The Bloater tethered to the chains on the pole gave a low moan and Joe blinked and recoiled in horror, startled back to reality and the weighted gravity of the fucking mess Ellie had gotten herself into.

_Not her fault_ , the snakelike voice inside his head whispered. _Yours. Fucking yours. Your fault_.

The Bloater's trademark deathly stare, at least out of the one good eye not totally engulfed by the Cordyceps Fungus, was still there, but there was no real life there, not anymore. "Huh." Joel frowned and cocked his head to the side and regarded the strange sight in front of him for a moment. "Hard to believe you used to be a person, asshole," he growled, his mind feeling like it was reeling. "When I find out which one of these fucknuts took Ellie, you're gonna have yourself a little _feast_ , big guy. You'd like that, huh?"

The Bloater gurgled in response though whether or not it understood, he didn't fucking know.

Joel would dare to say that this thing's stare was pathetic, that he almost—almost—felt a pang of sympathy for the fiendish form that hobbled, bumbling and yet somehow stiff and erratic, towards him.

_Almost_.

The fear gripped him just in time as he blinked as a hand appeared from his right and he ducked and darted out of the way, narrowly avoiding this big guy's grasp. "Jesus—Jesus Fucking Christ!"

Joel knew this thing could only communicate in blood-curdling groans and tortured moans and shrieks, and he wondered if once you became one of the Infected if you still felt anything at all. Knew things. Were any semblance of the old person that you used to be before the infection spread and took over. He glanced around quickly, biting the wall of his cheek, and glanced down at his guns.

No shells or bullets left, at least not any that Joel could see for himself that he could salvage and use, so assuming these assholes had taken Ellie for a supply run into the city, maybe he could swing by an armory and see if he could salvage anything. "Or maybe this place'll have something." Joel didn't know where the fuck Sarah had led him, or what these creeps had done to Ellie, how long she'd been with these guys, but he did know one thing: Time was of the essence, and he needed to get out of here, quickly. Joel bit the wall of his cheek and then his tongue, biting down hard on the appendage until he could taste the metallic taste of blood that welled and lingered, settling upon his tongue. He frowned.

" _Good_ ," he growled, lowering his body into a crouch as well as he could as he noticed a burly looking guy at least two sizes bigger than him come out the front entrance of the warehouse. "Time for me an' you to have us a little _chat_ , motherfucker," he hissed, careful to keep his voice low as he crept forward, the inner beast screaming within the confines of his chest to strangle this stranger to death.

Unfortunately for him, Joel had forgotten that he'd whisper hissed it through gritted teeth, and his stupidity cost him. The man who looked like he had to be some kind of fucking pro football player in a former life before the world went to shit whirled around angrily on the sole of his boot and growled.

There was stillness on both sides. If hatred were visible, the air around the pair of them would have been scarlet. The suddenly, so much movement, so much force in the guy's swings as he lunged forward.

It quickly became clear to Joel that this asshole didn't just want him dead, he wanted him smashed, obliterated, nothing left to bury. Clearly, they didn't like guys infringing on their territory.

" **HEY**!" he bellowed, his face reddening in anger as his dark eyes narrowed. "Who the fuck do you think you—" But his rant was cut off midway as Joel's fingers curled into a tight fist and he drew his arm back and hefted it as far as he could, his fist contacting the man's already broken nose, Joel was pleased to see was still leaking crimson from both nostrils and twisted grotesquely to the right in a huge mess. " **WHAT THE FUCK, MAN? I THINK YOU BROKE MY GODDAMNED NOSE! AGAIN!"**

" _Shut. The. Fuck. Up_." Joel's threat escaped from the back of his throat in a low warning growl as he lunged, wrapping both hands around the thick, beefy, tattooed column that was this asshole's throat.

"Wh—what the fuck you want, man, huh? Guns? Supplies?" he choked out, coughing and gasping, wheezing for air that simply was not returning to his lungs. At least, not as long as Joel kept his hands around the guy's throat. "Fuckin' lemme go an' I'll get you whatever the fuck you goddamned want!"

"The girl!" Joel growled through clenched teeth. "What the fuck did you do with the kid?"

"Fuck you, man! I ain't telling you shit! You broke my fucking nose, you cocksucker!" he yelled, now weakly clawing at Joel's hands still holding his throat hostage with dirty blackened fingernails.

When the man did not answer, Joel felt another low warning growl in his throat. He didn't have time to fuck around and he especially didn't have time for this fucking asshole's bullshit. If this guy thought Joel was bluffing, then he was sorely mistaken. Letting out a haggard sigh out of frustration, Joel knew he was going to have to resort to extremer methods to get this fucking cunt to talk. "Fine, so be it."

Joel, albeit reluctantly, relinquished his grip upon the creep's throat, and as the NFL quarterback coughed and spluttered for air, Joel stepped back as the stranger threw his body weight behind the fist that edged closer to his face. Not anticipating the guy would actually get a good solid hit in, his fist hit Joel's jaw with such force, blood pooled into his mouth. Pain erupted from the point of impact.

Scrunching his nose and pulling a face, he turned his head sharply to the left and spat out a mouthful of blood, crimson red, garish, and sticky in his mouth, probably staining his teeth by now.

Joel panted heavily as he withdrew his gun from his holster and loaded the last three bullets into it, cocking it and pointing the barrel of the end directly at the stranger's temples, right between the eyes.

"No, no, no, no, no!" screamed the Stranger, which was what Joel decided to call him until he got a name out of this guy, raising his hands in surrender above his head and taking a faltering step back, nearly tripping over a twig and almost would have fallen directly into the path of the chained Bloater. "We—we got the girl, b—but I swear to God, we ain't fuckin' done nothin' to her! She's safe! The—the little bitch is safe, I swear it, man—she escaped an' headed towards the city with one of our own guys, Sam!"

" **WHERE**?" bellowed Joel. His voice sounded rougher and coarser than usual, though in situations like this when he needed to weasel information out of someone who really didn't want to die, the gruffness and hardened clipped edges of his voice could come in handy. Like right now. " **TELL ME**."

"Th—the old warehouse out by that department store, Hecht's I think, off of Soneto Avenue!"

It was becoming increasingly difficult for Joel to even consider this Stranger's words to be genuine considering the words pouring unchecked out of the guy's thin lips came from the same group of people that had abducted Ellie without so much as leaving a single goddamned clue behind for him to find. If it weren't for his half-delusional state of mind and infrequent visits from his daughter, he'd have never even gotten this far.

This punk didn't deserve to live, and if Joel granted him that mercy, then this guy could very well come after Joel and Ellie and seek revenge on his fallen comrades, and that was just simply one fucking thing that Joel could not allow to happen.

With his own two hands, Joel grasped the guy's head in his hands and brought his kneecap up to his nose, probably breaking this guy's nose for a third time and released his dark-haired head. He screamed and clawed at his nose as crimson leaked from both his nostrils and this time, his nose looked like it was twisted all the way to the right, not left. This Stranger definitely wasn't going down without a fight, though. It was the rings on the asshole's fingers that really hurt and kept catching the already bruised skin underneath Joel's eyes.

His head jerked backward, and he tasted that familiar coppery tang of sweet blood in his mouth. Didn't need to look at it to know the Stranger wasn't going to win this fight. Joel wouldn't let him win.

He was arrogant for one, a pure showoff that flaunted with flurries of punches and good swings, fast yes, but left himself open, and due to his hulking size, he was slower than Joel was. Joel let the guy jab him just to get his blood rushing in heat, though pure adrenaline surged and coursed through his veins. Shaking his head, Joel stared into the Stranger's eyes. It wasn't like he fucking enjoyed killing.

But he saw no other solution to this problem. Now that he knew where Ellie might be, he couldn't risk any of the guys' other crew finding out about this little 'chat.' This creep couldn't be left alone after all of that. It would put Ellie in unnecessary danger, and he'd made a promise to get her to the Fireflies.

This rational line of thinking multiplied the reason for Joel to fucking break this cocksucker. And he would. Second thing about this guy: he'd never met Joel, so he didn't know how he operated.

True, this guy was fast, but Joel was way more focused, not staring in his eyes, but at his chest, the center point for all attack, his weakest point, given how his lungs and shoulders were heaving, straining to regain airflow to his lungs. This guy hadn't been in a good quality fistfight like this in a long time.

Joel could see his burly shoulder, thick waist, and wherever he was going to attack, from whenever, Joel was going to greet him. The guy came with a leg, his dirtied boot soles practically shoved in Joel's face. Pulling a face of disgust, Joel grabbed it and then yanked his dagger out of his sheath and stabbed him with it. Hard. He screamed, and that was Joel's opening to lunge and tackle him to the ground.

Each blow he made was precise, an exhale of breath with each one. _Breathe. Breathe_. He could remember his old leader of the Hunters he ran with for a short time, guy by the name of Rick, telling him that. Joel felt his curled fist land in the Stranger's gut, the once hard bones along his body now crumpled like cereal. He was starting to get slower. Joel got faster, which meant he had the upper hand, the advantage. Joel could feel himself penetrate this guy's defenses before he could so much as blink an eye.

In the middle of their fight, Joel felt his anger fade and blankness was its replacement, along with a strange humming noise in his ears that rang unceasingly. Goddamned tinnitus is what it was, he was sure of it, he was sure, but still… Joel frowned, feeling like he was watching his own body at work here.

Joel could see all of the Stranger's soft spots. So, when he finally gagged and then spat blood one last time off to the side, trickling's of it spattering across Joel's palms and his left cheek, Joel wasn't surprised an ounce that he fell over, cracked on the muddied ground afterwards. Then nothing but silence. His chest rose a few more times before he finally gave up and gave one last shuddering breath.

Then he died.

Joel let out a pained gasp of surprise as swells of fiery pain pulsated up his side. His goddamned bandages were leaking blood again. He'd need to change them soon, but Ellie needed him right now.

The stakes of this little game of cat and mouse with the rest of these Hunters was working out surprisingly well in Joel's favor, better than he could have ever fucking hoped, given he had no clue who these assholes were. "Th—these s—slippery l—little shits, Ellie, I knew they were gonna be trouble," he gasped, groaning with the effort as he staggered forward, already planning to hot wire the parked truck outside. He figured if he could hijack one of these guys' cars, it would throw suspicion off himself and he'd stand a better chance of getting closer to Ellie. It was worth a shot, anyway. He had to try, damn it.

A low, guttural moan reached his eardrums once the incessant ringing had died down a little, and with one last look of disgust, Joel dragged the man's lifeless, bloodied, broken body within lunging distance of the Bloater, leaping backward just in time to avoid getting swiped by the huge Infected.

"Th—that's f—for hitting me, you asshole. Ain't none of your friends can fucking run from me," he snapped, his dark eyes growing listless as he watched the Bloater feast on the man's flesh, emotionless.

Joel swiped the truck's keys off the ground, guessing they must have fallen out of his pocket during the struggle and headed towards the car, not daring to look back as the Bloater feasted on whatever was left of the guy. "Nice little warm up snack for you. Don't fill up too much on that one, gonna be back with the rest," he growled angrily, blocking out the sound of flesh and ligaments tearing off the Stranger's corpse, and the sound of the guy's already broken bones, now crunching horribly.

Joel pushed his face closer, ordering his body to fall the fuck in line and push past the pain of his sepsis. He had to find Ellie and get her away from these goddamned perverted fucking psychopaths.

Retreat would be a disaster, a show of weakness, an inlet for these guys to surge through. Nothing in Joel's face betrayed his fear. It was a mask of defiance and surety. That's why was the Leader here.

His fear would need an out, of course, as horrible visions of whatever Ellie was going through danced in the forefront of his mind, but he pushed them aside for now. "No," he growled, clenching his eyes shut as he slid into the driver seat and started the keys in the ignition and backed the car out of the warehouse's parking lot and made to head towards the city's limits, near the outer edge. "I ain't gonna let you go the way of Sarah, baby girl. I won't," he promised, spitting his words through gritted teeth. "I'm comin'."

_Just hang in there._

* * *

Sarah was gone. He couldn't remember when exactly she'd left him, but his baby girl had fucking done it. Sarah had ridden with him shotgun in the truck that he'd stolen from that warehouse.

She hadn't spoken much, occasionally commenting on the lack of music on the radio. She'd led him to the edge of the railroad tracks and towards the outskirts of the city, where he'd gotten a glimpse of an all-too familiar flash of a brown ponytail and her backpack and had silently pointed for him to follow them. Another dart of movement out of the corner of his peripherals and Joel's gaze remained fixated on Ellie's backpack, carefully following her and the fuckin' kid who didn't look a day over twenty, and his blood boiled within his veins at the thought of a guy with Ellie.

"Kid, you'd better keep your goddamn fuckin' hands to _yourself_ if you wanna keep your dick where it belongs. The fuck kinda fucking shit is this? She's fourteen years old, asshole, you some kinda sick pervert or something?" he growled, raking his fingernails down the wooden panel of a column he'd ducked behind to avoid being spotted by the blonde-haired boy. It took Joel a moment to realize what he was feeling for the guy was rage.

He'd recognize it anywhere. "Son of a bitch, goddamn, baby girl, I knew I'd find you. You did it, kid. Just…hang in a few more minutes, baby girl, I'm comin' Ellie, just…wait, wait for me, baby girl," he breathed, wincing and inhaling a sharp breath that pained his lungs. Joel exhaled in frustration and glanced down at his side. His palms came away crimson. "Fuck me," he growled through gritted teeth, and inwardly cringed and bit the wall of his cheek as he took a slightly shaking and faltering step forward and inadvertently stepped on a twig, snapping the goddamned thing in half, giving away his position.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of red that at first he assumed to be Ellie, given about the only thing she wore aside from her green jacket was that red hoodie of hers that really needed to be fucking washed, though it wasn't like they had the luxury of electricity these days. At least, not until they could get back to Tommy's settlement once he and Ellie returned from the Fireflies' base camp.

Joel bit the wall of his cheek as he felt something cold, hard, and metallic press against the base of his skull. Stifling his groan, he turned around gingerly at the waist, expecting to see another asshole.

He blinked in surprise, and the shock must have registered on his face, because the person holding the gun to the back of his head promptly lowered it a half inch and removed their hood.

It was a girl. She was older than Ellie, maybe about twenty-five or twenty six if Joel had to pinpoint and guess at the girl's age, with light blonde hair cut short in a pixie cut and narrowed blue eyes as her fingers curled into a fist around her weapon. When she spoke, her voice was coarse and nervous.

"Who the fuck are you?" she growled through clenched teeth and rooted jaw, though the fact that she lowered her weapon and took in his disheveled, injured appearance told Joel he could trust her.

Joel felt his lips part open slightly to answer, wondering just how much more this fucking day could get any worse and even stranger, when he was jolted out of his process of forming an answer by the sound of a loud, resounding crash.


	10. No Way Out

**CHAPTER TEN**

Sam didn’t know what the fuck had compelled him to help their newest runner escape the warehouse, and nor could he explain quite why the skin of his palm where his hand had brushed against Ellie’s thigh on accident an hour ago while they were walking down the city streets, careful to keep to the back alleyways to avoid being seeing, fucking burned like fire, and his heart was beating like there was a goddamned fucking lion in his fucking chest. They’d managed to find a store that didn’t quite look like it had been thoroughly picked over by the looters yet, so the two of them ducked in here to grab some supplies, with the intent of making a run for the woods. They’d be safe there, and they certainly couldn’t go back to his Dad’s place, now that it was probably only a matter of time before they came after them.

Sam had left Ellie to her own devices to look for clothes and had wandered towards the men’s section of the department store, absently picking through the men’s sweaters and the graphic t-shirts, though in actuality, watching Ellie. When he had touched her hand earlier, something foreign and unfamiliar stirred not only within him, but it took over Sam’s thinking. The rest of his world became an unimportant blur that was banished into the far corners of his mind. The only thing that mattered anymore was finding an excuse to keep the kid by his side. To touch her more, to see if she bled.

Sam felt his entire body stiffen as the young woman began to walk back towards the estate, leaving the shoes and bags aisle and making to head back towards the junior’s department. It was then that he began to have highly inappropriate thoughts of the kid. His dad had never really sat down with him growing up and had the sex talk, and he was a fucking mess about it and had no clue what to do. He wanted Ellie on her back, he wanted her on top, Sam wanted her any way that he could take the girl for himself, really. As Sam continued having these wild thoughts of the girl, he knew it was the inner beast that lay caged within the confines of his chest, threatening to come loose, given that it had been fucking ages since he’d last been around a girl, let alone close to one his age.

At first, the idea of finding a new group sounded good to Sam, and maybe that was why he’d agreed to help the kid get the fuck out from under his dad’s thumb, but then a thought struck him that he’d not thought of. Ellie would be in the company of other guys, other men if they found another fucking group, and just that thought was enough to send the young bastard flying into a rage and he felt his blood begin to heat up in his veins as a fit of insurmountable anger threatened to consume him.

Sam felt his jaw lock and tighten, and he ground his teeth in anger, his eyes flashing indignantly as they stayed locked up Ellie’s retreating form, his gaze drifting to her ass. She really did have a cute little figure. Nice brown hair. Her cheekbones weren’t especially high, and her nose was a little too long to be perfect, but there was an undeniable symmetry to Ellie ’s delicate features, like that of a pretty red rose, just waiting to bloom, to fully become…a woman. And he could help her with that if she would just fucking cooperate.

Perhaps that was what had Sam so fascinated. Ellie’s smooth dry skin despite the harsh currents of the ferocious winter was dotted with a light smattering of freckles about her nose. Her delicate eyebrows curved in swooping arcs over those bewitching eyes and her small button nose complemented her wide forehead and rather blunt chin. These features would not turn heads or make anyone look twice…it was the girl’s eyes that were her true prize, what held Sam so interested in her, where she came from.

What secrets would he uncover, as he looked behind them? He couldn’t wait to find out. Her eyes were like the stars in the night sky, the way they drew unsuspecting guys like Sam in to explore the swirling depths of emotions held in her depths. The black of Ellie’s pupil was surrounded by a ring of jagged silver fire swallowed by a dark forest green.

At one glance, the girl’s eyes merely shone, but if you dared to look closer like he had done so earlier, and just like he was doing now, shrouded in the shadow of the bush behind which he had taken refuge, Sam could see the sadness of heartbreak, the joy of love (at that he scoffed again), the hope of a better future for herself, the pain of sorrow at losing not only her home but her family as well, and the fire of a spirit that even Sam knew the girl would not give up.

At least…not willingly. Sam felt himself frown as he could practically hear his father’s taunts, Jack’s condescending remarks as he poked fun of his only son’s lack of sex life. His father’s lack of eye contact should have warned him over the years growing up in his father’s shadow. It wasn’t natural to avert your gaze from the one you claimed to love. _Love_.

At that thought, Sam felt his lips curl into a twisted smirk as he scoffed and rolled his eyes. A concept for women, that false emotion that Sam knew did not exist. In his father’s moments of quiet rage, Sam felt…dehumanized. Maybe it was why he was the way that he wasn’t, he didn’t know, nor did he give a shit, really.

He knew it was way too late for him to change.

Growing up, Sam had given Jack everything a son could possibly give his parent, and only wished he could do more to please. Now he had to know that the person he idolized never truly existed. That their life of the endless fucking ‘recruits’, aka kidnapping people against their will would never fucking stop until someone killed his daddy or someone else took over for Jack.

Conversations were just talking to Sam, competitions to him. Nothing more, and nothing less. Jack saw his bastard son suffering, his mental health in decline and he had made goddamn sure that Sam had fallen into that pit, the only decorations in the pit his own godforsaken claw markings from his nails on the walls he could not scale.

Now his daddy had the gall—the audacity—to claim that his methods growing up didn’t drive his bastard son mad, that it was just ‘how he was,’ and there could be nothing in all seven kingdoms that would cure of him of this so-called horrible affliction, this unquenchable bloodlust.

But Sam had news for his father. His heart had long since been hardened, and the beating corded muscle within his chest had walls. He had walls against his dad and any other fucking person on the planet and there was no way to break that wall, and he’d be damned if he was going to let the girl go off on her own in search of this Joel asshole she hadn’t seemed to stop being able to prattle on about.

_This Joel cocksucker better stay the fuck away_ , thought and released a low growl from the back of his throat at the thought of that creature who was less than half a man taking this woman, this resilient fucking girl who had a hell of a trash mouth on her who had for reasons unknown somehow managed to snare him in a net of intrigue like one of those sailors in the fucking _Little Mermaid_ movie his little cousin had loved so much before she died in a car accident, had, unfortunately, Ellie’s ears perked up at the nose and she froze at the sound, though from which direction it had come, she could not quite tell.

He would just have to make it quite plain and perfectly clear to any man with a cock between his legs and a pair of wandering eyes that Ellie was no longer available. That _she_ was _his_. And anyone who would dare try to take the dog’s prized bone from him would find their duck shot off with his gun, their own balls stuffed down their throats so that they choked.

“Get a fucking hold of yourself,” he whisper-hissed through clenched teeth as he watched the girl resume her leisurely pace through the clothing aisles, seemingly making to head back towards the sock aisle, probably. His mind felt as if a stone were coursing through his veins instead of blood. Sam glanced downwards once Ellie had vanished from his line of sight completely.

He was half of a mind to follow the girl, to corner her in one of the dressing rooms, maybe, since they were alone and it was just the two of them, and blanched, looking caught off guard at the man he saw staring back at him. The shadow of the caged beast within his eyes. He felt his stomach lurch and he thought he might vomit.

There was the smallest fraction of Sam’s mind that knew what he was and hated it. Disgust. Yes, that’s what he felt for himself. Disgust. Total disgust with himself, at who he really was, what he represented. Sam felt his shoulders slump and his blue eyes cast downward in a mournful gaze, his handsome face held a forlorn, worn expression now. It was his daddy's fucking fault he was this way, really.

His mouth was set in a semi-pout as he remained alone in the men’s aisle of the department store. He’d moved on to the watch and wallet aisle, now fully aware he was just bullshitting, trying to find the right time, fighting against his urge to follow Ellie. It would be easy enough to fuck her here with no one else watching. It would be over within a minute. But…and this was the part he was struggling to accept the most, that he had seen something in the kid’s eyes that could only be described as hatred. A look that he had not seen in a girl before. At least, not directed towards him.

Standing this close to her as he had been only moments ago, he could see Ellie’s lips clearly, glistening attractively with a light coating of some kind of cherry lip gloss or some bull shit coating that added a further sheen to her already healthy lips. Sam imagined biting her mouth until he drew blood and then sucking it from the wound.

All these features sat together on a delicate almost angelic face.

And Ellie would be all _his_. And if she refused, he was going to fucking kill the bitch.

* * *

Ellie emanated a tense exhale through her nose and dared to poke her head around the corner of the abandoned department store, making a beeline for whatever was left of the juniors’ clothing section. It was fucking freezing and as the winter dragged on, it was only going to get colder, and she needed a jacket. She furrowed her brows into a frown as she knelt on the floor and picked through what she could find.

A pretty good haul overall: some black sweaters, a new coat with fake fur lining on the hood’s rim, and a pair of gloves and fuzzy slipper socks to wear at night to keep her feet warm.

A noise from behind startled her out of her rummaging through the junior’s section and she bit the wall of her cheek and slowly knelt into a crouch before standing upright, the muscles in her jaw clenching, and she grabbed onto a fallen clothing rod that had fallen off one of the racks, fully prepared to club whoever—or whatever—it was—to death if need be.

Not a pleasant way to go, she imagined. Having your face fucking bashed in until your eyeball popped out of your skull. Ellie forced her body to try to relax, but it was so fucking hard, and she heard herself exhale an audible sigh of relief when Sam poked his head around the corner, an awkward little half-smile on his features, and a light pink blush speckling along his cheeks.

“Sorry if I scared you. No Infected or any other guys in here, so I think we’re safe,” he murmured quietly, and there was a strange glistening, moisture in his eyes that Ellie had no clue what the fuck to think of. He wasn’t about to up and cry on her, was he? She felt her frown deepen and she scowled, lowering the clothing rod only a half an inch as Sam gingerly approached, his hands raised in surrender.

Ellie watched as apprehension seemed to melt off the blond-haired kid that was only six years older than her. She supposed if she were interested in guys, she might have thought the guy was cute, in another life, but…she didn’t work like that, and she wasn’t sure she liked this weird look in his eyes.

She swallowed nervously past the growing, swelling lump in her throat and suddenly, her throat felt dry as Sam’s gaze drifted downwards towards the bundle of sweaters in her arms. “You found some?”

“Y—yeah,” Ellie stammered, her voice coming out as a low, breathy squeak. She frowned and coughed once to clear her throat. Now was _not_ the fucking time to show how fucking nervous and timid she was.

She stared down at the floor. Ellie huffed in frustration and blew a stray strand out of hair out of the way that had gotten in her eyes. She should have fucking known that something good happening for once in her fucking life wasn’t realistic. Joel was fucking still missing, and she had somehow foolishly been led to believe that escaping that piece of shit warehouse with a guy, all by herself, and no gun or any kind of weapon to defend herself, had been a good idea. Her suspicion that happiness and safety were impossible was turning out to be true. Just like it always fucking did.

And now her stupid behavior of trusting people way too fucking fast and not wanting to be alone was certainly coming back to bite her in the ass. Ellie was beginning to wonder exactly just what it was that she had allowed herself to get into. She wondered if she made the right decision in allowing Sam to help her. The guy seemed nice enough, but still…it didn’t change the fact that he had basically allowed his dad and his fucking goons to kidnap her, and hadn’t done any fucking thing to stop the assholes, so that, in her mind, made Sam just as guilty as the rest.

It wasn't enough to shake the feeling of unease that had begun to fester in her heart. All she knew was that she didn't like how Sam was looking at her.

Not one bit… The kid, judging by the look in his eyes, meant to harm her or…or worse. Ellie gulped nervously, not knowing what to do in a situation like this. She felt terrified. If she had her fucking gun then at least she could pop a cap in his ass and make a run for it, but she didn’t. Those creeps back at the warehouse had taken all her stuff, and pretty much the only thing Sam had been able to get back for her was her tiny little dagger barely bigger than a fucking kitchen knife and her backpack.

How the fuck was she going to be able to convince Sam to let her go, that she could take care of herself on her own and she needed to fucking leave and find Joel on her own? Same, she could tell just by the look in his beady, narrowing eyes, favored violence, and cruelty as a means of getting what he wanted. _Probably learned it from his daddy_ , Ellie thought darkly.

Sam, she could tell, was not going to be able to be reasoned with, probably, and all she had as a means of defending herself was a little dagger that he could easily knock clean out of her hands. But it was either this or let Sam do whatever he was going to do and that she could simply not allow, and so, Ellie stood in a ready stance, her stick clutched tightly in both of her hands, an uncertain look of fear upon her clammy face. All the reasons for her _not_ to do this came flooding in as if her body chemistry had just sent them a blanket invitation. Ellie ground her teeth in anticipation, feeling the soft panic that would grow or fade, depending on whatever action she chose to take next.

Fight or flight. She knew it would fade if she backed away, made some half-hearted excuse, and just bolted, making a run for it, but there was this tense look in Sam’s darkening brown eyes, that he was not going to let her go.

So, with that knowledge in mind, if she did not face this fucker at the moment here and now, then he would undoubtedly find her again, perhaps he’d find her on the fucking street again, and next time, he wouldn’t be so ‘kind’ to Ellie.

Exhaling a shaking, pained breath through her nose, Ellie felt a muscle twitch involuntarily at the corner of her right eye, her mouth forming a rigid grimace, and an involuntarily pitiful little whimper escaped from her lips as they parted slightly. Her green eyes widened in shock, large and watery as she held her ground firmly.

She swallowed and blinked back salty and briny tears as the man threw back his head, chuckling darkly. "Put down the fucking rod, Ellie. I ain’t gonna hurt you,” Sam promised with an evil glint spreading across his sallow and sunken in cheekbones.

He nodded towards the bundle of sweaters in her arm. “They fit? You try ‘em on? Why don’t you show me? Take off your shirt and model 'em for me,” he growled, his voice casual, though it didn’t stop the bile from creeping up Ellie’s throat and the acidic stomach layering from settling on her tongue. Just when she fucking thought she could trust somebody, they showed their true colors and Sam, just like everybody else, was another creep. Ellie scowled, knitting her brows together in fear and confusion. Since when had anybody other than Riley, Marlene, and these days, Joel, shown her an ounce of kindness?

Never, that's fucking when. It certainly did not sound like a promise that she could trust, and she was not about to take Sam, who was a stranger to her and who she didn’t really even known, at his word, for that would get her nowhere and dead fast, probably with her body left to serve as food for the Infected.

She frowned, though she lowered the stick slightly. "Fine," she snapped, hating hearing how cold and unflinching her voice sounded. For a moment, she did not quite sound like herself. "I—I won't use my…clothing rod," she sighed, glancing down at the large branch in her hand, I—if you don't use yours," she added, glancing nervously towards Sam’s broad waist, upon which his gun sat idle at his hip, and his fingers twitched. When Sam stepped from the shadows, his gun drawn, Ellie was quick to set her face to 'casual indifference.'

Her only way out of this was for this man to overestimate her skill level, to assume that her lack of fear came from mastery instead of a raw nerve. "S—stay back, I—I'm warning you! I—I won't hesitate to use this against you I—if need be! Stay the fuck away from me o—or I’ll fucking kill you! I mean it, asshole, I’ll bash your fucking brains out if you take one more step," she warned fearfully, brandishing the clothing rod in front of her. She knew deep within the recesses of her heart that she needed to be ready to use it if the need arose, and it was certainly looking like it was shaping up to be that way. Ellie swallowed timidly.

Sam smirked, quirking a thick dark brow her way and folded his thick arms across his chest. "I doubt you know how to use it anyways, sweetheart. Why you so afraid? I ain’t gonna hurt you. I’m not a pervert like my dad and his friends. I just…wanna spend some time together. That’s all. Not often I get time to myself with a cute girl, El.”

Ellie quirked a brow Sam’s way. “Bullshit!” she shouted, her face reddening. "I’ve seen you stare at my chest and ass, asshole! You’re a fucking pervert! What's your game?" Ellie clenched her teeth in anger and meant to let out a low warning growl from the back of her throat, though in actuality, it escaped her lips as more of a soft whimper, and she hated that she could hear her fear.

"No game," Sam answered steadily, though it did not take an expert in learning how to read people's expressions for her to tell that he was lying.

"What do you want?” she growled through gritted teeth. She had debated staying silent, though she could tell this fucked up kid in front of her would have found a way to extract the information he wanted, one way or another. If it was a conversation Sam wanted to have, then fucking hell and Jesus Christ on a pony, she would give him one, if it meant that it would stall this man from whatever he wanted to do to her.

He snorted, practically rolling his eyes in mocking disgust. "I woulda thought it would have been obvious, kid. The hell do you think you're going to do with that, little girl? Poke me with it to death? You're playing a dangerous game, Ellie, if you think you can go up against me and win, kid," Sam snorted and regarded the young redhead with something akin to amusement in his dark brown, almost black eyes.

Ellie furrowed her brows into a frown and swallowed nervously past the lump in her throat, biting the inside of her cheek hard enough to bleed.

_Fuck. No way out_. Ellie stifled a moan and focused on Sam’s eyes, which were darting back and forth, shining, and glinting in the dimly lit abandoned storefront.

They were a deep, earthy brown. But there was something else there, too. Something…glistening, almost, that caused Ellie to marvel in their color. How she could reduce something so spellbinding to just a simple word as 'brown', when the colors invited her to marvel in their simplicity was beyond her. The man's brown eyes were a million different hues, so she wondered what the word 'brown' even meant in this case. Sam’s eyes held secrets, the same way that a pot held layers upon layers of deep soil because it was essential to keep the plant safe. The roots were held in place the same way his dark, liquid eyes held on so tightly to his secrets.

Ellie blinked, momentarily broken out of her involuntary trance of the young man’s eyes. His appearance alone in it of itself was seductive.

Sam’s features were alluring. There was no attempting to dispute this little fact. Sam’s blond hair was cropped short and close to the scalp, easier, probably, if Ellie had to guess, to keep it out of the way while he worked. It was almost as if God Himself had molded Sam just to spoil those eyes if God even existed. The cold dark eyes of the man that were full of intensity, of danger. He had a Roman nose and a pair of thin, pink lips that were in the form of a truly twisted smirk.

His tight jaw was an angular shape that was filled with little stubbles from two-day stubble. He would be needing to shave soon. His pale skin looked so…right.

"Stay back," whimpered Ellie, as she maneuvered the discarded clothing rod that she had picked up so that the sharpest end of the wretched weak little thing was pointing directly at Sam's chest, who was rapidly closing in on her. "I—I'm warning you," she added in an attempt to sound more threatening than she actually did. Ellie attempted to keep her voice firm and her hands steady, but that was much easier said than done, and she could not seem to quell the uncontrollable tremors in her hands, nor the warbling little crack that escaped from her voice.

Sam snorted in response to her threats. "You won't be able to win, little whore. You know that I outweigh you, and I'm faster than you, _bitch_ ," he growled, and Ellie visibly flinched at the harsh bark of the man's baritone voice as Sam spat the curse word as though it were poison that had settled upon his tongue, "but if you insist and wish to try to fucking fight me off, then you're more than welcome to try, my little pet, and I'd only be too…" He paused, as though searching for the right words, "happy, shall we say, to play along…" When Sam smiled at Ellie, she knew she was royally and truly _fucked_.

She nervously shook her head no and continued her retreat, skirting alongside the wall in the vain hopes of reaching the front of the department store’s doors, where she could run for her life. Ellie let out a pitiful moan of agony as she had to practically strain her neck, craning it upwards so she could look the man in his cold, unforgiving brown eyes. He was about twice the size of her in terms of height, though most adults were. She had, rather, unfortunately, inherited her mother's short stature and everybody was fucking taller than Ellie was. It wasn't fucking fair. 

With that said, he lunged Ellie, and she let out a yelp as a single warning shot was fired off, and the bullet that he had fired narrowly grazed her ear and knocked the clothing rod clean out of her hands. It was a hell of a fucking shot, and she watched, devastated, as her only means of defending herself shattered into several broken pieces as it hit the ground. Ellie cried out as the sheer strength and force of Sam's blow hefted her arm violently backward.

Before she could even so much as think about picking up the remains of the rod and trying to gouge the man's eyes out, she felt Sam's strong hands wrap about her middle, his fingers clutching almost painfully tight on Ellie's waist.

" **NO! LET GO OF ME YOU FUCKING PERVERT**!" she screamed, letting out a pained gasp as he moved behind her, crushing his rough and slightly calloused hand over her mouth. Ellie lashed out, trying in vain to clamp down her jaws on his hand and bite down as hard as she could in an effort to get away, but it was no use. She let out a pained muffled whine.

Ellie threw back her uninjured arm towards her assailant, trying to hit the man with the crook of her elbow, pretty much anywhere that she could reach. "FUCK!" Ellie screamed, flailing as best she could, though she knew it was helpless. She cried out as Sam quickly grabbed hold of her flailing arm and violently wrenched it behind her back. She winced and bit the inside of her cheek, stifling her urge to cry out a pained gasp of surprise. She hoped her arm wasn't dislocated or broken. That was going to be a hell of a thing to try to explain to Joel. _If_ she made it back and that was if Joel was even still alive.

She winced as she heard Sam let out a threatening low warning growl from the back of his throat. "Stop. Fucking. Moving. Bitch. What _the fuck_ am I gonna do with you?" he whisper-hissed through clenched teeth into the shell of her ear. It sent a shiver of revulsion and fear down Ellie’s spine. "You really _are_ a pretty little thing, aren't you. I've got something to…to show you, girl. I think you'll be interested in what I have to show you, sweetheart. Trust me," Sam growled, with a twinkle of something sinister in his dark brown eyes.

Ellie swallowed nervously and let out a whimper. Ellie clenched her eyes shut and tried to take her mind away to someplace better, not wanting to see what was about to happen to her next…

Whatever he wanted of her; it wasn't good… Her body felt like it was frozen, and her lungs overworked. Ellie could feel her limbs start to shake and felt a horrible numbness begin to spread through her body. She had never felt so terrified in her entire fucking life. Not even when David and his goons kidnapped her. Ellie whimpered and let out a half-choked, pained, frightened sob, and kept her eyes clenched tightly shut.

Had Sam not been maintaining his firm vice grip upon her arm, she surely would have fallen already. Ellie felt her jaw lock up, feeling heartbroken and defeated, and so, so incredibly _stupid_. Ellie knew she should have just fucking gone with Joel and told him to quit his bitching. Ellie should have known better than to wander the streets of this fucked up world alone, given who she was and what she was. A young girl like her, not even sixteen yet, was an easy target for assholes like Sam. But she had cared so much about having her own form of independence, even if it meant rebelling a little.

Well. That was certainly coming back to haunt her now, wasn't it?


	11. Alive Inside

**CHAPTER ELEVEN**

Shouting rent the air, sounding like it was coming from one of the abandoned stores. What was once a moment ago silent became polluted with rage. Joel tensed, the tension traveling from his shoulders all the way down to his toes, and even Blondie standing in front of Joel, looking as though like she didn't want to hurt him, but Joel could see the trepidation and apprehension in her eyes, that the woman didn't fully trust him yet either, and he could see it in her eyes, the scream had scared the fuck out of her. Well, that worked both ways.

"What the fuck was that?" The woman's second sentence to Joel as she still held her gun trained on Joel's chest, but Joel didn't so much as spare the little blonde a second glance the moment the loud crash coming from inside the department store he could have sworn he saw Ellie and the blond-haired punk go into, choosing to forsake the door and go in through the busted up window.

" _Ellie_ ," he breathed, growling the kid's name in a low whisper. He didn't bother to look back over his shoulder as he bolted into a run, or as best of one as he could, given the nature of his injuries. "Stay the fuck here!" he shouted towards the blonde she-stranger. If she wanted to kill him and rob him of his stuff, not that he had much left to offer, she was gonna have to do it a little later.

_Hang on, baby girl. Don't fucking die on me, kid. I'm coming…_ His feet pounded the tarmac with all the grace of a sack of wet concrete, the springing graceful steps of five miles earlier had long since disappeared. His rasping throat was as parched as a dead lizard in the desert sun. His head bobbed loosely from side to side with each footfall and his eyes felt really heavy in their sockets.

Ellie's scream tore through Joel like a great shard of glass, straight to his heart. Joel felt his eyes widen and his pulse quicken, his heart thudding like a rock rattling in a box, threatening to break free from the confines of his chest.

Her scream came again, desperate, terrified…human. The blood drained from his face, and before Joel was even aware of making a conscious decision, his legs were pounding furiously towards the department store in front of him and Blondie, his ears straining for more sounds, more clues as to where it had come from.

Joel had no fucking clue as to what to do when he got there, or what he would find if Ellie was hurt, and if that kid had so much as touched a single hair on her head, by God, he was going to fucking _murder_ the little shit and paint the walls of that department store red with his blood, and no going _quick_ for him, either. It was the kind of scream that chilled your blood and made it run cold.

It pierced Joel's brain and ignited some primeval pathway. Adrenaline surged through his veins, fight, or flight, and he was in fucking fight mode.

He had no clue as to what he would do when he got to Ellie and the kid, or what he would find if the kid had killed her already, just that he had to get there, fast…

* * *

Ellie let out a shaking pained breath and inhaled as much air as she could as she jabbed her elbow into Sam's side, and it was just enough pressure, just enough force to get the stronger kid to loosen his grip, and allowed her to scramble on her knees to reach for the metal clothing rod that she had dropped.

"Oh, shit, oh, god, oh, thank fuck," she whispered, though not low enough so that Sam didn't hear it. She felt her face drain as she quickly realized her mistake. "Fuck." Ellie shirked back as far as she could, leaning against the wall away from Sam, who had a wicked gleam behind his moistening green eyes.

And he wouldn't get his fucking hand off of her thigh. It was gross really, how obsessed guys seemed to be with sex and shit. He'd even gone so far as to whisper gross, disgusting shit into Ellie's ear just a split second ago about her giving him a handjob. Ellie let out a low whimper as Sam's grip on her jeans tightened, and she felt hot tears prick at her eyes as she felt the kid fumble with the waistband of her jeans. She squirmed away, as best she could, and he growled in frustration.

"Hold fucking still you little cunt," growled Sam, his jaw tightening in anger. "Or you're gonna hurt. I'm tryin' to be nice to you, but you move around a whole bunch like this, baby doll, then I'm gonna fuckin' kill you, and then you'll never get back to your daddy. You think this fuckin' Joel guy is gonna come an' save you, doll face? Ain't nobody coming for you, girl."

"Please!" Ellie heard herself beg in a hoarse, raspy whisper, her voice sounding like it didn't entirely belong to her, and she thought it was a goddamned miracle that she could even speak, let alone form a cohesive thought.

She really wished she were back in that cabin with Joel. She'd take listening to his bullshit nonsense stories over this fucking sick joke any day of the week.

Ellie let out a pained whimper in fear and pain as Sam's calloused and rough hands turned into claws and pawed at her sweater. The hand wrapped around the pale column of her throat was tightening, and Sam's other hand was strangely tenderly caressing her thigh, over her jeans, in a way that caused the bile to rise up in her throat and she thought was going to throw up all over his t-shirt.

"Get off of me, you fucking pervert! Get off!" she screamed in a hoarse whisper, thrashing, and shooting out her leg, hoping to kick him off her.

"Oh, don't you worry none, doll face. I'm gonna get off. That's for sure, don't gotta worry about that," Sam growled darkly, clawing at Ellie's wrist, pinning it harshly against the wall he'd cornered her by. "Stop. Moving. Bitch."

" **STOP**!" Ellie screamed, earning a harsh shove against her back as Sam's hand came to rest on her waist, and violently turned her around and pressed against her back. She winced and bit the wall of her cheek as her leg accidentally ground against his growing hardness. Now she really thought she would vomit.

All she could do was whine and mutter soft, pained groans from underneath Sam's hand as she continued to fight against the stronger boy to the best of her ability. This was all a fucking sick joke, and if she ever found Joel again, she'd fucking swear to never leave his side, ever again.

"Shut the fuck up, bitch," Sam snarled, baring his canines, and for a moment, Ellie shivered, feeling a wave of cold wash over her features as she felt his hands move down to the waistband of her jeans, his fingers shaking so badly in the effort to calm his own tremors that he had miraculously managed to not undo them yet. She swallowed hard past the lump in her throat and tasted bile.

"Let me _go_ , asshole!" she sobbed, biting down on her tongue hard that within seconds, she tasted the metallic tang of iron as coppery blood settled upon her tongue. "Get the fuck off me! I'll—I'll kill you! I swear to God! _Lemme go_!"

In a fit of wild panic that manifested as fear, Ellie hefted her arm back as far as she could be given her current predicament and curled her fingers into a fist, and struck Sam's jawline. Ellie had never really punched another living human being before, so she was incredibly surprised at the pain that blazed up her left arm as her fist connected with the older boy's jaw.

She hadn't really been thinking when she'd let out her boiling antipathy and swung her fist too tight, too quick, and potent, into Sam's defined, chiseled jawline lined with two or three-day stubble. The impact of her punch felt like thousands of venomous blades piercing apart Ellie's clammed fist.

It led the fourteen-year-old to one conclusion, that it really fucking hurt like hell, and she knew immediately as Sam let out a low warning growl out of the back of his throat, and the way his eyes narrowed until they were mere slits, that she had made one hell of a big fucking mistake just now. She'd stepped on a nonnegotiable landmine and was about to pay for it.

Ellie stifled a cry of pain that threatened to escape her lips as she bit down hard on her tongue, hard enough she could taste the coppery blood welling there, as she drew back her hand and rubbed it gingerly. Punching Sam in the jaw to make him let go of her did absolutely nothing for her and had paid off in no way. The only thing she'd managed to succeed in doing was to piss him off even further.

The second her fist had come into contact with Sam's cheek, it had sent fiery swells of pain up her arm, and Ellie let out a muffled whimper as he drew back his hand and slapped her, the sound echoing and resonating within the department store's walls. Ellie staggered backward, clutching at the rapidly developing bruise underneath her eye, eyes watering and stinging like crazy. The hit had been a good one, and she could feel blood pooling in her mouth.

Ellie let out a pained moan and choking out a shaking whimper, bringing her trembling hand up to her cheek, allowing herself to slide down the wall and cower in the corner as Sam advanced upon her again, his lighter from his jeans pocket that he lit all his cigarettes with in his hands, and he'd flicked the damn thing on and was watching the flames with mild amusement.

Ellie coughed a painful breath that sent swells of pain shooting down her ribcage and to the tips of her toes in her Sketchers sneakers. Her vision swam in black swirling mists, still reeling from the sheer force of the guy's hit. She felt like she was close to fainting, and honestly, she probably would have preferred it at this point.

At least that way, Ellie wouldn't be awake for whatever this sick perverted creep had planned for her, then. She let out a pained gasp as Sam's form shimmered and waved in front of her vision, and for a moment, she could have sworn the guy's features were morphing into David's right before her very eyes, hazy vision or not.

"Ngah—n—no, get away from me!" she screeched, clawing her way away from him, not even caring at this point if she had to crawl her way to fucking freedom on her stomach or not, as long as she got the fuck away from him. Sam seized her arm and violently wrenched her to her feet, shoving Ellie unceremoniously up against the brick wall, ignoring Ellie's screams and desperate pleas for him to stay this madness and stop this.

"Do not _ever_ hit me again, you little bitch," he growled through gritted teeth. "You do something stupid like that again, and I'm gonna cut off your pretty little fingers and make you eat them. See if I'm joking, dollface."

"Look, man, just let me go, you fucking know this isn't right, goddamn it. I—I know you aren't like Jack, Sam. I—I'm fucking begging you, please don't fucking do this, guy," pleaded Ellie tearfully, managing to choke out in her words in a shaking breath, clenching her eyes tightly shut and turning her head sharply to the left, since her vision was darkening anyway.

If she was going to pass out, it might as well be now, save her from the worst of it. Ellie barely stifled a low moan at the creep's next words to her.

"Can't do that, sweetheart. You know that better than anyone, El," Sam snorted. The look of hatred and cold fury in his eyes was almost too much for Ellie to bear, hence why she didn't want to look into his eyes. Anything but to see his face light up with power and lust.

Maybe it would be better if she could just take her mind away to a happier place, try to dissociate as much as possible, and let whatever this guy wanted to do to her happen. Ellie bit her bottom lip as she felt a horrible burning sensation on her arm, and she screamed. She couldn't keep it in any longer. The burning pain was just way too much for her to bear.

" **SHUT UP**!" roared Sam and as Ellie shakily opened her eyes and glanced down at her arm, she realized what Sam had done, why her arm hurt like fuck.

He'd put out one of his cigarettes on her arm. Ellie sobbed as he let go of her arm and tossed out his now put-out cigarette to the ground, stomping on it with his boot. The pain seared through her arm better than a branding iron, her mind conceding to the pain, unable to bring any kind of coherent thought to completion. Without even meaning to, she slumped all the way to the floor, and her body curled into the fetal position, something primeval, all the while the pain her arm burned. Everything in her right arm felt scolded, and move or not, Ellie was in more pain than she could have ever imagined was possible.

A bullet in her head between her eyes would be mercy right now, but the odds of Sam leaving her alone was the best she could possibly hope for. The pain had an unpleasant warmth to it, eating away at her stomach.

There was nausea too, just enough to make Ellie pull her knees to her chest for support and breathe slow. Ellie had often prized herself in ignoring pain and just rocking on regardless, but that just isn't possible right now. It owned Ellie in this current moment, dominating every thought, controlling every action.

Ellie knew that Sam was a fucking sick perverted psychopath, just like his daddy, who would show her no mercy. She wondered if she were to just close her eyes and let the creep do whatever he wanted to her if she just took her mind somewhere else and just let him do the thing, if it would be all over then.

If he would let her go. Over and done with…but the fiercer part of her personality couldn't let herself be subjected to that.

She would keep fighting this creep until she was either passed out or dead. "Wh—what do you want?" she choked, as she felt Sam's grip tighten on her shoulder as he violently brought her up standing.

"I want you to let me do whatever the fuck I want to you bitch," he growled, no semblance of warmth in his voice.

Ellie felt herself involuntarily shiver at the 'term of endearment' Sam had for her.

"It's Ellie. My name. Start fucking calling me by it asshole. Not 'whore', not 'bitch,' **MY NAME IS ELLIE**!" she roared, spittle flying from her lips as she screamed it right in his face. If he hit her for it, then so fucking be it. He was going to kill her anyway.

he inhaled a shaking breath as Sam's head whiplashed upright, and his cold eyes narrowed until they were almost mere slits as he regarded the young teenager in silence and picked up her little black bag off the ground and slung it over her shoulder, dipping into the main compartment with fumbling fingers. It was a miracle she could even unzip the zipper with how bad her hands were shaking. Ellie just had to find fucking something. Mace, something. Anything to incapacitate this guy just enough to make a run for it.

"What?" Sam's voice growled from the back of his throat before he could stop himself saying it.

Ellie did not answer, feeling a horribly thick, acidic bile start to coat at the back of her throat and settle on her tongue.

"What did you just say?" the man snarled, and before Ellie had any time to react, he lunged forward and grabbed her by the wrist, squeezing it hard enough to break it.

Ellie swallowed, licking her lips to try to moisten them, though it did her no good. Ellie felt like her heart was throbbing and pounding against her chest as she gave a shaking tug and drew back as far away from Sam as she possibly could.

The teenager let out a muffled, barely audible whimper of fear and pain as she realized Jack's fucking messed up son was probably going to burn her other arm with another one of his cigarettes again now that he'd figured out she wasn't just going to play along with whatever it was he wanted to fucking do to her here. Ellie bit the inside of her cheek, not wanting to think about what Sam would do to either her next, but she couldn't control it.

What would he do? Shoot a hole in her leg and rape her here in the department room? Slit her throat? What, then? Maybe this creep would just kill her right now and do it anyway, and Ellie knew that holding out any semblance of hope for Joel to somehow come to find her was fucking hopeless.

For all she knew, Joel was dead, and she was about to go join him. Ellie bit her tongue as Sam's hand lingered upon her waist, longer than she would have liked.

Anything else and she thought she was going to vomit at the idea. His hand on his waist was really starting to scare her, as was the way he had this infuriating habit of gently running the pads of his fingertips along her collarbones.

But still, she had to try to reason with this guy to stay alive. "Look, asshole, you gotta be fucking kidding me if you think you're trying to get off by fucking me. I'm **FOURTEEN FUCKING YEARS OLD**!" she bellowed, her fingers curling into fists around the strap of her little black bag as she quickly came to the realization nothing in here was heavy enough to use against him. Ellie furrowed her brows into a frown. "Are you really that sick, man? Don't you have any fucking pride left in you?"

Ellie stomped her foot in a moment of frustration and shirked away from his touch, gingerly rubbing her arm where Sam had grabbed her, wincing as she gingerly rubbed her wrist, already seeing the red markings in the shape of the man's fingers beginning to form. To her horror, Sam grinned an unnaturally wide grin and began to laugh.

"I get it now," he growled angrily. "You think I'm stupid. _Don't you_ , Ellie?" Sam closed off the small distance of space between himself and the cowering kid who he had backed into a corner, pressing his body up against hers, and he had to kneel slightly so that he was at eye-level and could look Ellie square in the eyes. Ellie let out a whimper and shrunk down in the corner as much as she possibly could, though it would do her no good. Yes, she kind of thought he was stupid. Like only-two-working-brain-cells-kind-of-stupid.

He had made the grave mistake of thinking Joel was dead. Ellie had one last shred of hope left, and she clung to it like she had hung the shreds of her sanity upon it. Joel was a former Hunter and knew how this fucking world worked, how to play the game, and stay alive, and there was no doubt in her mind that once he got to wherever 'here' was, he was going to be less than pleased with the way that Sam had treated Ellie, and was going to fucking kill this creepy pervert.

For all she knew, Joel was already on his way over here. She hoped so, anyway. Sam's pissed off voice interrupted her thoughts, jolting Ellie out of the moment. "That's it, isn't it? Don't bother lyin' to me, doll, I can see it in those eyes of yours," Sam growled, seizing a fistful of her black sweater, and tugging her violently forward. "You think I'm stupid, Dontcha, little Ellie, huh?"

"Uh-huh," the stranger growled, turning back towards Ellie, and seizing another fistful of her sweater and shaking her slightly. "Don't even _go_ there. You hate me, don't you? You think I'm fucking dumb, sweetheart. Don't you, baby?" Sam whisper-hissed through gritted teeth as his jaw locked up and became tight.

"Ugh, please don't do this," moaned Ellie, shirking away from his touch and leaning her back against the wall as far as she possibly could in a vain effort to get away from this man. She could feel herself trembling beneath him, but then he was practically now holding her black sweater hostage, and pressing her tightly against the wall, preventing Ellie from making any kind of a break for it. "I—I don't…look, buddy, I don't know what you want from me!"

The last word she barely spoke it above a whisper and something with Sam snapped. Just the thought that the teenager cowering on the floor in front of him wasn't going to go to him willingly was enough to send him into a spiraling rage.

He bared his teeth in a low warning growl and violently relinquished his grip upon Ellie's arm, watching, satisfied, as she slumped against the wall in a heap, the strength leaving her legs and her knuckles were white with the effort to steady herself as she balled her shaking hands into fists and resting them in her lap.

"I'm gonna make you wish you never set foot in my dad's fucking turf tonight, nosy little bitch," Sam planned threateningly. "You don't wanna end up dead or burnt to a crisp, you listen to what I tell you to fucking do and shut the fuck up?"

"Don't fucking do this!" Ellie whimpered, sticking out her bottom lip and biting down hard on it. I—I won't try anything stupid like try to kick you or run away. Swear," she whispered, her voice cracking at the thought of even considering she was trying to reason with this fucking sick excuse of a man.

There was a stunned silence for a long moment, and Ellie could feel an uncomfortable pit forming at the bottom of her stomach, churning it into intense cramps, although maybe that was just the bruises forming on her side from where he'd hit her repeatedly in the gut a couple of times to try to incapacitate her to prevent her making a run for it.

"You not kicking me an' tryin' to play nice, little miss Ellie isn't gonna stop things," Sam remarked coldly, his voice sounding dull and flat, with no emotions. "I don't think so, dollface. I think you an' me an' are just gonna have us a good time, an' then I'll fuckin' let you go find this Joel."

His words escaped him as a growl, and Ellie mustered a tiny nod of her head and swallowed hard past the lump in her throat as she watched as Sam pulled up a wooden chair from a different corner of the room, straddling the thing backward and sitting on it that way, cocking his head to the side and watching Ellie like she were nothing more than fascinating specimens in some kind of zoo that he'd caught and wasn't quite sure what to do with, yet.

Like if he was trying to decide if he should kill her, eat her, or torture her slowly until there was nothing fucking left.

She was just internally relieved he'd stopped trying to take her fucking sweater off. For now, at least, but who knew when he would fucking try to do it again? Ellie swallowed, licking her lips to moisten them, though no moisture came, and cast her gaze to the left and right. Though one thing Ellie knew for certain was she didn't like how the creep was looking at her, with a hunger in his eyes. She didn't like it at all. Not one bit. She was well and royally fucked.

Ellie blinked, startled as a flash of movement caught her eyes, little more than a shadow, albeit a very tall shadow, hulking, and she bit the wall of her cheek and drew in a sharp bated breath as it stealthily crept in between the racks of the clothing, and she felt like fucking crying in relief, feeling unshed moisture welling in her eyes as the figure stepped out from the shadows and ducked behind a corner to avoid being seen by Sam, though not before shooting her a furtive little wink, raising a finger to his lips, signaling her to keep Sam talking as a distraction while he snuck up behind him for the kill shot, though the familiar glint of his black and red plaid shirt gave him away.

Thank fucking Christ, he came for her.

_Joel_.


	12. Best for Us

**A/N: Sorry for the late delay! I never know how to do endings right, and I got caught up in finishing part 2. Long story short and I'll save the rant, but I might be one of the few who did not* enjoy the game, but I won't discuss it here for fear of spoilers for those of you who haven't played it.**

* * *

**CHAPTER TWELVE**

Joel didn't know which was worse. Seeing Ellie in such a terrifying state or the fact that he was going to fucking _murder_ this asshole that currently was holding Ellie's throat hostage, threatening to break the bones in her neck if she didn't comply with his demands. He honestly didn't know how the fuck this happened. One minute he'd been out on a scouting mission in the woods for food, and then separated for at least a week and a half, maybe more.

Honestly, after the first couple of days, he kind of lost count, and now, having finally found the kid… _this_. Hot boiling rage coursed through his bloodstream, igniting a wave of fiery anger that was even worse than when he'd dealt with the cannibalistic assholes that had taken Ellie a few weeks ago. He was totally done with the niceties. He stifled a low warning growl from the back of his throat and bit the inside wall of his cheek as he grabbed the younger boy roughly by the shoulders.

"Kid," he growled angrily, relishing in watching the younger boy's face pale in color as the blond-haired teen's face totally drained, "you fucked up. Hard," he snarled, baring his teeth, and leaning in so the tip of his nose was practically touching the kid.

Without even waiting for the kid to get a word in edgewise, he threw the wretched little punk down on the ground, barely managing to repress his twisted sneer as he could have sworn he heard the kid sniffle a little. " _Good_." He growled, not caring if the kid started full-on bawling in the abandoned department store.

He was in for a world of fucking misery and hurt and nothing— _nothing_ —was going to save this little shit's life. The kid would be lucky to walk out of here alive after what he tried to do to poor Ellie, who was looking on the brink of tears.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of red and yellow and realized the girl from outside had followed him in here.

Thinking he was going to have yet _another_ problem to deal with, he felt his head whiplash sharply upwards the young blonde and felt some of the tension in his shoulders dissipate as he allowed himself to relax as the woman rushed to help Ellie up. A muffled shout from outside drew her attention as she swiveled her head lazily towards the front, busted open window of the department store.

" _Fuck_ ," she growled. "That's gonna be Jack." The girl bit her bottom lip and glanced back towards Joel, blue eyes glistening with unshed moisture. "Goddamn it," she swore, pinching the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. " _Ugh_. I was hoping it wouldn't come to this. Fine," she snarled. "Do whatever the hell you're gonna do. Kill him if you want, this whole group's a bunch of assholes. I was gonna head off on my own tonight but looks like you're expediting this process. I'll…" Molly paused, seeming like her mind was going a mile a minute. "I'll head them off, lead them away, tell them they headed out of the city limits. Eventually, with any luck, the dad will just think that his kid ran away and drop it. He's kind of a jackass so I doubt he'll miss the little shit this much. You seem like a decent man. Glad you two found each other. Good luck, man, and Ellie, kid, you take care of your old man, you hear me? Don't let him wander off again," she joked.

The girl with the blonde pixie cut gave Joel and Ellie a brief little nod, and Joel silently tried to thank this she-stranger with his eyes, but before he could even open his mouth to speak, she darted out the front, already shouting there was no one in this building and to check further downtown and to cut them off at the overpass, maybe they were still following the tracks.

Joel blinked owlishly after the young blonde, and before he could respond, a low, coughing sound reached his eardrums, still ringing with tinnitus, though this noise was enough of a disturbance for him to make out, and then he remembered what the fuck was going on.

"Goddamn." He swiveled back around sharply to face the kid, who was doubled over, clutching at his ribcage, coughing, and wheezing from the harsh blow he'd been dealt with Joel threw him across the floor. "Fuck. Right. C'mere, asshole," he growled, kneeling down to the blond-haired kid's eye-level and seizing a fistful of the boy's t shirt and shaking it slightly as he pulled him up, his other hand coming up to grip the kid's chin and cup it, tilting his head sharply upwards and forcing the teenager to meet Joel's gaze. "What to do with you, you miserable piece of shit," Joel snarled through gritted teeth, no warmth in his tone. "You into raping young girls, huh? You ever see what happens to rapists in prison, boy? It _ain't_ pretty…though," he sighed, fiddling with a knife in its sheath he wore strapped to his thigh. "I suppose, you could still see it all with one eye."

"P—please!" Sam begged, the teenager's voice sounding meeker than it had moments ago when Joel had snuck up behind the pair of them, whereas a second ago it had sounded rougher and coarser. Evil, even. "I—I didn't hurt her, I—I swear to God, man! Don't fucking kill me, man, I swear!"

" _He's fucking lying! Kill him, Joel_!" Ellie screamed, tears pouring down her ashen face in a constant steady stream of tracts as black dots swarmed in the front of her vision, and it looked like it was becoming more and more difficult for her to breathe, and Joel's temper flared at seeing red welts, almost finger-shaped markings on Ellie's throat as he realized this punk he had fucking dead to rights had almost succeeded in strangling Ellie just now.

The girl let out a panicked, choked gasp as Sam lifted his head and met her gaze, and she could swear she heard the sound of…something, was it a door being broken down? A gun being fired. A kid screaming. Sam, who looked like he wanted to say something to her, was looking royally ticked off, and Ellie could tell by the fuming look in his listless eyes that he was definitely going to remember this, and she bit her lip.

" _Kill him, Joe_ l!" she bellowed, hot tears pricking and stinging the corners of her vision. " _What the—what the fuck are you waiting for_?"

Ellie let out a whimper as a rush of cold winter from the outside wafted into the abandoned department store. There was a lot of commotion going on around them all, it sounded like, for just the three of them in here. Noise and chaos that didn't really make sense, like…like there were more people here with them now. "Oh, fuck me," she whispered. I _s it Jack?_

But she had no time to ponder who—or what—was in here in the building with them. Maybe Molly's ruse hadn't worked and the other guys from the warehouse had finally figured out that she was bluffing.

A muffled whimper from Sam refocused her attention back to whatever was going on between the kid and Joel, and she swallowed hard past the lump forming in her throat. Ellie bit the inside wall of her cheek and watched the scene before her play out, and silently waited.

Joel ran a finger down the Browning 9mm with the same expression most men reserved for porn. Carding his free hand through his thick tuft of dark hair that had long since needed a trim a week or so ago, he pursed his lips into such a thin, rigid line, taut and unmoving that they almost disappeared.

"Please, man, I—I'm fuckin' _begging_ you! I—didn't hurt her!" the kid was sobbing, and this only fueled Joel's wrath even further. "Lemme go!" The blond-haired teen was practically begging now, groveling on his hands and knees, tears pouring down his reddening face, eyes all swollen.

Joel let out a guttural warning growl from deep within his chest that immediately silenced the kid, though it did not stop the stray sniffle from escaping as tears poured down his cheeks. "Shut the fuck up, you piece of trash, you don't say another _goddamn_ _word_ , you hear me? If you even _look_ at her in a way that pisses me off, and I'm mighty ticked already kid, I'm gonna pop a _cap_ in your ass an' leave you here for the Infected. Fuck, I might do that anyway. It's no less than you fuckin' deserve, you creep. You didn't _really_ think I was gonna let you walk outta here _alive_ , did you? No way. You and your fucking crew would just come after her again," he growled, his fingers curling into a tight fist over his own weapon.

His dark eyes narrowed as they fell upon the metal rod near Ellie's backpack. "Kick that over here, baby girl," he instructed and caught it mid-air as Ellie shot out her foot and did as Joel said, kicking the fallen clothing rod she'd been using as her only means of defense against Sam.

Sam swallowed nervously through hot, salty tears. He knew it was coming and his muscles tensed as much as they could. The knowing still didn't soften the blow. The rod was as hard as it looked, and his fucking leg was no-ball. He screamed as Joel brought the rod down hard on Sam's right leg, just below his kneecap and he felt the bone split into an untold number of fragments as the teen's mind quickly became inoperable, black dots swimming in front of his vision.

The pain took Sam not very far away, but deep inside his mind to some primitive place that knew how to cope with the kind of pain that precedes death. A bullet to the head would be a mercy. But just one look in Joel's eyes was enough for Sam to know that this asshole wasn't going to be quite so kind to him. He was fucking _livid_.

Sam's vision became blotched with violent colors that he was pretty sure weren't even on the spectrum of the human eye that moved without pattern or design as the burly man brought down the rod on his leg a second time, this time, on his other leg, effectively crippling him, preventing him from ever walking again.

The wall of pain still crippled him, but Joel's face swam back into Sam's view. The older, grizzled man's face was just as you'd imagine it to be as if he were waiting for a bus. Then, something happened. He…he _smiled_. The left side of his faint red lip tugged upwards creating a sinister smirk on his god-like face, making Joel look truly terrifying.

The corners of his lips twisted upwards in a small, half-triumphant smirk before continuing his narration of Sam's demise.

"Kid, it's just no fun if you don't see it coming, isn't it," he growled, as he brought the bat down on his leg, and swung it in the kid's face, pointing the edge of the bat in the kid's face, blood-spattered with remnants and bits of white bone clung to the permanently stained wood.

Joel let out a guttural growl as he could focus on nothing but the hammering of his heart, its very great attempt to escape his chest. Nothing else ran through his mind except for protecting Ellie and getting her to safety. No number of scenarios in your head would ever prepare you to physically beat a person—much less a _kid_ —within an inch of their life.

That was if you could even think at all.

His body was jolting with a new vigor, an untapped rage that was boiling up from the pit of his stomach to the rest of his body as he looked into the blond-haired boy's listless eyes. He felt…hot. Joel didn't even notice his fists were clenching until blood came back on them as Sam desperately reached out with clawing fingers in an attempt to break free of Joel's strong, ironclad grip.

Sam was way too busy staring at Joel, roaring at his assailant like a lion, foolishly using up all his energy when his time was already fucking expired.

"Like it or not, kid, this is where you're gonna die," Joel snarled. Behind the cursing and the threats from the blond-haired kid, he was fidgeting, squirming underneath Joel's body weight, moving back and forth. If he were so pissed at Joel for what Joel was doing to him, he would have been ramming his fists into him, anything he could to get away, really. But his eyes confirmed the rest. He was nothing more than a scared little kid. Though barely looking like he was twenty, Joel could tell by the eyes, how the kid was the subject of abuse growing up and had known nothing but, but…it was like that song by that one guy, how did it go?

"'No one lives forever…'" Joel snarled. For Joel, the killing in this new world was his least favorite part, it felt like a necessary chore rather than any kind of sick, twisted pleasure, but so help him, this punk before him screaming his lungs off deserved it and more.

This kid was going to fucking _die_ for what he tried to do to Ellie, and _nothing_ was going to keep it from happening. The possibility of this kid telling any of his crew that he ran with where they were headed depending on how much Ellie had told these folks sent a cold shiver down his spine.

His face mirrored the grim expression she had seen etched on Joel's rugged features several times before, but she could tell he was fucking pissed, his insides practically on fire.

In the beginning, Joel had told her more than once that he had denied his own bloodlust following Sarah's death. He'd been curious as to why, when he had been a Hunter, his colleagues, and others in their crew that he'd run with at the time tended to suffer after killing someone, and he never did. But now they both knew.

Joel was a psychopath, self-diagnosed, and a perfect fucking mimic.

The cold look reflected on Joel's face gave Ellie the shudders, and even she was hardly aware of the fact that she'd let out a muffled whimper as she heard a single shot ring through the air as Joel, completely ignoring the kid's muffled whimpers and pleas for Joel to show even an ounce of mercy, pointed the barrel of the gun directly at the blond-haired kid's head, right between his temples and did not hesitate to pull the trigger, and Ellie stifled a scream as she watched the kid's brains being blown out right in front of her. The sickening smell and metal and rotting flesh blanketed the dusty air in a choking aroma.

You would have thought by now she'd be used to it.

But the strings this scene in front of her pulled hit Ellie like a tidal wave. She blinked, feeling something warm, sticky, and moist on her cheeks. With shaking fingers, she lifted her left hand to her face and allowed the pads of her fingertips to ghost over her cheeks, and they came away bloody. Trembling, she lifted her chin and tried to focus her gaze a few feet in front of her rapidly fading vision. She thought she was going to be sick.

"Joel," she managed to choke out in a half-formed sob, breathing out in a shaking breath, blinking back briny tears, and blinked owlishly at Joel as the older man wordlessly tossed the metal clothing rod aside next to the dead kid's feet and spat a mouthful of blood at the boy's black leather boots.

Sam's once lively skin was now dull, gray. He was staring off into space, eyes wide with shock and horror, mouth open in a permanent scream, but Ellie couldn't tell what he'd been looking at when he died or what it was that he was looking for. All she knew was that Joel killed him.

Her head throbbed and ached, sending a pulsating pain to the back of her skull, and then Joel's rugged face, looking admittedly worse for wear, flashed in front of her vision as he knelt beside her, and she heard the unmistakable sound of his gun being holstered and then she was in his arms.

Joel was…Joel was _hugging_ her. Ellie blinked back tears and swallowed hard past the lump forming in her throat. " _Joel_ ," she wailed, her fingers clutching tightly onto his black and red plaid shirt for support. "What the fuck took you so goddamned long?" she shouted. "He tried to…he tried to…" Her voice cracked and faltered as it dipped and broke.

"I know, baby girl," he whispered, pulling her close and wrapping his strong arms around her in a way that made her safe. Secure. Like as long as she was around Joel, then nothing bad was ever going to happen to her.

Joel pulled back slightly to study her face, furrowing his dark brows into a frown, and gently rubbed tiny circles in the small of her back. "You good to stand? Can you walk? Did the creep hurt you anywhere else? Y—you're okay, baby girl. You're safe. I got you, I got you, it's me…it's me…"

He whispered his words soothingly not the shell of Ellie's ear as his embrace tightened, though there was no mistaking the crack in his own voice as he too seemed to be struggling against his emotions and losing.

Ellie mutely nodded, biting her bottom lip in a slight pout and finally tore her gaze away from Joel's rather intense stare and glanced across the department store towards the exit. No sign of Molly or Jack or any of the others. With slightly shaking legs that felt like jelly, one hand clutching onto Joel's forearm for support, he helped her to her feet, and she stumbled.

"Sit. Down." Joel instructed harshly, though not unkindly. He put his calloused, bruised hands on Ellie's shoulders and somewhat forcefully guided her down to the floor, allowing her back to rest against the wall. "Just focus on your breathing, Ellie. You're gonna be just fine, baby girl."

Ellie slowly sat up straighter, her back resting against the wall, and blinked as her vision returned to normal and she took in Joel's rugged appearance. "Jesus, Joel. You look like shit. What the hell happened," she murmured weakly, the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips as she looked at him.

Though Joel was looking exhausted, dark circles under his eyes, and she could tell his bandages were going to need to be changed soon, she saw in Joel's eyes that the rugged, older man was looking immensely relieved to see her alive and relatively unharmed, minus the marks on the column of her throat where Sam had tried unsuccessfully, thanking fucking Christ, to strangle her.

Ellie blinked back tears and silently nodded when she heard Joel ask again if she were okay if Sam had hurt her, afraid that if she opened her mouth to speak any further, she would get sick. She couldn't help but notice her breaths were shaky and quick, and she felt really lightheaded.

But what she wouldn't give for a glass of ice water and some hot food!

Ellie whined as Joel grabbed her forearm and held onto the sleeve of her black sweater and lightly pulled her to her feet. "Wait!" she hollered, flinching as her voice came out shrill and loud, louder than she'd have liked. She twisted slightly at the waist and grabbed her fallen, discarded backpack and rummaged in the topmost compartment. "Before we get the fuck outta this god's asshole of a city and away from those sick perverted creeps, I got you something. For—for Christmas, just in case we—we missed it, Joel. I think we missed it already, b—but it doesn't fucking matter. I thought you'd like it. I—I found it earlier here in the store, and…here," she whispered, biting the wall of her cheek as she held out the small black box to Joel. "F—For you. Thank you for saving my life, Joel."

Joel furrowed his dark brows into a frown as he draped one of his arms over Ellie's shoulder as he gently guided her outside, where a burst of cold winter air waited to greet the pair of them as he led them back towards the other side of the railroad tracks where he'd parked the truck he'd stolen.

"What is this, baby girl?" he asked, and his frown deepened when Ellie did not respond.

Feeling a pained, weak smile tug at the corner of her lips that she did not bother to try to fight back, Ellie shoved the little black box practically at Joel's chest and weakly socked him on the arm in a fit of playful banter.

"Just open it." Now she sounded almost keyed up and excited.

Joel cast her a wary, slightly distrustful look as it was rare for Ellie to show any other emotion save for sarcastic cynicism, typical teenager behavior. He scowled and bit his tongue as he opened the box and flipped it out and out tumbled a battery. When he realized what it was, something unidentifiable flickered through his eyes and his hardened expression softened. 

“For me?" he asked, glancing towards the broken watch that Sarah had given him. "How did you know what kind to look for?" he asked suspiciously, quirking a teasing dark brow Ellie's way, who blushed.

"The label on the back of your watch, dummy. _Duh_ ," she joked, finding it difficult not to roll her eyes a bit at Joel's question. She felt her shoulders sag in relief as she emanated a tense exhale as Joel removed his watch and fumbled with the device for a moment, murmuring a few choice words under his breath until he was able to get the new replacement battery in it.

Almost rocking on the back of her heels in excitement, she suddenly felt like a kid at Christmas again back at the Fireflies' camp, who, despite the current state of the world, always tried to do something nice on holidays for the kids in their group to give them a semblance of normalcy. "Do…do you like it?" she asked, biting her bottom lip, waiting with bated breath.

The ambiguity of not knowing was killing her, as Joel's face remained impassive, and there was a look in his eyes and strange glistening moisture brimming within the man's eyes she didn't really know what to make of. Joel lifted his head after what felt like several long minutes spent in an agonizing silence and nodded.

"I do. Thank you. It's…it's real nice, El."

Ellie didn't say a word as Joel wrapped an arm around Ellie's shoulders and pulled her close, gently rubbing her arm. Despite the strange heaviness in her stomach that felt like a fucking brick was lodged within, it fluttered at the feeling of Joel giving her a hug, feeling damned glad he was okay.

She sunk into the warmth of his side, appreciative of the simple gesture. His touch made the world outside in the frigid fucking cold a little bit warmer somehow, her future and place in the world a little less bleak.

Joel's embrace was warm, and his strong arms felt and seemed very protective when wrapped around her frail, battered, and beaten little body.

The world around them melted away as she squeezed him right back, not wanting the moment to end, though sooner or later, it was going to have to. Joel pulled apart first, glancing down at his newly fixed watch.

Ellie didn't know how long the two of them hovered outside of Joel's stolen trunk, soundless for a long time, neither one of them speaking much.

But whatever was happening, it felt like too precious a moment for either one of them to ruin first, though eventually, Joel broke the silence.

"Get in," he answered, coming around to the side of the truck and opening the passenger door for her. "We gotta get goin', Ellie. Make up for the lost time. The Fireflies are expecting us," he said, the corners of his mouth twitching as he fought back a smile at Ellie's nonplussed expression.

He didn't speak much as he clambered into the driver's side of the car and put the vehicle into drive, and it wasn't until about ten minutes or so into the drive that he finally broke the silence.

"I don't know what exactly that stupid creep did to you, Ellie," Joel started, his gaze flitting back and forth between the road and Ellie as they headed on down the deserted highway, "and you don't have to tell me anything of what happened if you don't want to, but you… when I got there, was looking pretty shaken up."

He frowned and scowled, pursing his lips into a thin line. Joel, sensing Ellie didn't have an immediate response to give, continued to press the issue.

"The group that kidnapped shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. The whole lot of 'em, _sick_. And I saw the Bloater they kept tied up to a fucking pole like some kind of…pet. You shouldn't have come after me. You shoulda waited for me back at the cabin, and I would have come. And stupid. So very _stupid_. I—I can't let them get away with this. You say yes to this and we'll hunt down the rest of 'em," he growled, his knuckles almost turning white with the effort to steady himself as he maintained a vice grip on the steering wheel. "I'll fuckin' kill 'em all for what they did to you, baby girl. Just say the word and I will."

"But they _won_ 't," Ellie gently reminded Joel, really not wanting Joel to get involved any more than he already had. That was the last thing they needed, more assholes coming after them. "Molly, I only talked to her a couple of times, but she—she's nice. Not like the others. She said she was gonna lead the other guys away on a false trail, Joel. Remember?" "You came just in time before he could do anything bad," Ellie sighed.

"B—but baby girl…" Joel slammed his foot on the brakes as he spotted a shoulder and pulled over, banking into the turnaround, putting the truck in park as he shifted in his seat to regard Ellie with something akin to shock in his eyes.

Ellie flinched but was unable to tear her gaze away from his piercing stare. She bit her tongue and waited.

"Even if that jerk didn't get to the worst part of…whatever he was wanting to do to you, he still attacked you. He forced you up against the wall and tried to…tried to…" His voice cracked.

Frowning, Ellie stared back at Joel. She didn't need him to tell her that what Sam had tried to do to her was all kinds of wrong, sick, twisted, and very much fucked up.

She knew that it was, but she really didn't want Joel to get involved and hunt down those assholes when he was already injured. He had done so much for her, had changed so much of who he had been previously. He'd given up his old life so he could help her reach the Fireflies. He cared. About her.

Ellie shook her head to clear it, frustrated.

She didn't want the man to do anything rash that she knew he would only regret later. "Let Molly deal with Jack and his goonies, Joel. Let's just get the fuck out of here and move on from this, 'kay?" she whispered, hoping her voice sounded calm and thinking it was kind of ironic how the two of them had switched roles for a moment.

 _She_ was the one who'd been kidnapped, and almost had unspeakable things done to her, Joel having almost been forced to watch some of it, but _he_ was the one who seemed to need the comfort the most at this moment, and then it hit Ellie like a brick.

Ellie to Joel right now was his entire world, with Sarah long since gone and died from his life for how many years now, and if Ellie would have died today, then she knew that he would have lost a part of himself.

There would have been no doubt in Ellie's mind that Joel would have quickly whiplashed from despair to destruction if he'd lost her tonight. "I…" Her voice trailed off as she struggled to think of the only thing to say as she gathered her backpack out of the backseat and slung it over her shoulder, sighing in frustration as she looked out the window of the vehicle. "I'm sorry," Ellie whispered in a small voice, feeling her left hand close into a protective fist around the strap of her bag, feeling immensely grateful that Sam and his guys hadn't ruined it, and it was pretty much as good as new.

The only thing he'd stolen out of her bag earlier been her snacks and those could easily be replaced. She'd get some more Oreos at the next convenience store they raided. Junk food was the one thing that tended to be left well alone, Ellie noticed, and already, felt kind of hungry.

Joel sighed, putting his arm around her shoulder. "It isn't all on you, Ellie," he sighed. "I always knew you were crazy. Who would go out by yourself at the ass crack of dawn, just to risk your life for cookies," he grinned, a mischievous twinkle starting in his eyes that Ellie had recognized well over the last few months of them getting to know each other, that let Ellie know whenever Joel was just messing with her mind.

Ellie felt a smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth as she quirked a brow at Joel and folded her arms across her chest. "I'm crazy, huh?" she asked, teasing him.

"Well, yeah." Joel shrugged and shot her a tiny smile. "But I'm crazy too. You can't bring out something that isn't there, baby girl. Together, we bring out the crazy in both of us, but it was already a part of me, to begin with. You drive me crazy, and I drive you crazy. I know that. It isn't your fault any more than it is mine. But next time you go out for a snack run…"

His voice trailed off and hardened, and Ellie swallowed nervously, thinking that now was the part that she had kind of been dreading all night. The part where Joel would scream and yell at her for allowing herself to be caught in a compromising position and get herself fucking kidnapped. She steeled her facial muscles as she watched a muscle in Joel's jaw twitched.

Ellie was totally prepared for one of his outbursts of brief, fiery anger, but it didn't come.

"Next time," Joel began in a slow, cautious voice, though there was no hiding the smirk that was forming on his thin mouth. "Get the big Oreos. The one with the extra filling. You know those are my favorites," he joked, giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze, and letting out a tired sigh. He didn't hesitate or turn Ellie away as he felt the young, scared fourteen-year-old rest her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes.

"You got it, Joel. I'll steal two packages next time. You get one and I get one, and no stealing from mine, man, I'll know it when you do," she joked, lowering her voice to a low murmur, and thinking that Joel's voice sounded faint, and it was then that she realized he'd asked a question. She blearily opened her eyes and lifted her head, forcing herself to meet Joel's gaze.

"Mmm?" she asked in a daze, feeling her vision start to cloud over as she wanted nothing more than to go to sleep. Sweet, sweet, blissful, dreamless sleep. "Huh? Did you say something, Joel?" she asked. Staring wasn't quite the word for what Joel does, though he'd fit the dictionary description to a tee. His eyes rested on Ellie, not unblinking but slowed, yet the effect was soft and inviting rather than harsh and cold.

Perhaps it was his mouth that gave away his intention, not quite smiling at her, but tilting slightly as if they meant to, and she heard Joel let out a sigh as he turned the keys in the truck's ignition and started the car. Joel paused, returning his attention to the road ahead for a moment, seeming to struggle to phrase what exactly was on his mind and how to say it.

"I just wanna know, baby girl, if this whole thing with the Fireflies…is what you want," he said at last, and he turned to look at Ellie, though all the while keeping his attention fixated on the road.

Ellie nodded, considering the road ahead of her and Joel an adventure. Whatever happened next between the two of them was going to be a hell of a learning curve for her, and for him too, she supposed, and she found herself looking forward to whatever happened next.

Somehow, Ellie knew that as long as she was by Joel's side and he didn't do anything stupid like try to leave her again, that everything was going to be okay. And she knew that it would because she had no intention of ever letting him leave again, much less letting him go.

"Yeah. I am." Ellie's voice was stronger now, more resolute. Her thoughts briefly wandered back to thoughts of Molly, hoping the young woman who had somewhat inadvertently saved their lives would find a way out of Jack's clutches for good. She liked to believe that she would.

Ellie bit her bottom lip and, noticing Joel's furrowed dark brows in a frown, knuckles white on the steering wheel in an effort to steady himself, and reached over and held his hand. She felt stiffen a little at the unexpected contact, but she relaxed as soon as she felt Joel relax too.

After all the shit they'd been through, they had to trust each other.

"You won't leave me again when we get there?" she whispered, biting her bottom lip in a pout, almost fearful of Joel's answer, what he would say, what his answer to her question would be. "You promise?"

Joel startled, clearly having been caught off guard by her question, as she suspected that he would be, but he quickly shook off his surprise.

"Do you want me there, baby girl? If you do, I ain't going anywhere. I promise...I'll be right by your side the whole way. Start to finish. I swear it. You know, in the end, that I...I only want what's best for you, Ellie."

Ellie nodded, a soft smile forming at the edges of her mouth as she leaned back in the passenger seat of the truck and closed her eyes, feeling the swirling black mists of looming sleep and rest threatening to consume her, and she decided not to fight.

"Yeah, I do, man. I want you right there by my side for the rest of my life, Joel. It's…it's best for me if you stay, but I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's...what's best for _us_."


End file.
